Erik Satie

This study of the career of the French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925), sets his music against a background of contemporary developments in the arts in France. Alan Gillmor describes and analyses Satie's work and looks at the influence his music has had on the development of contemporary musical thought. He dispels the accepted image of Satie as a mere clownish eccentric, presenting him instead as a progressive artist, an anti-Romantic and early neo-Classicist. Satie's creative work, a marriage of art and anarchism, is seen as a powerful catalyst in the birth of the avant-garde in France, and Satie himself as 'a uniquely original musician who did more to enlarge the experimental boundaries of musical forms than possibly any other musician of his time'.