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Erik Satie invented ambient music. Pianist Aldo Ciccolini amplified it.
An essential album in any collection, ‘Erik Satie: Piano Music’ featured cover illustration by Pablo Picasso.
One of the best additions to your record collection, and to your psyche in general, is hiding in plain sight. As important as Brian Eno’s Music for Airports and as melodically pleasing as Aphex Twin’s ambient work, it helped define not only a movement but a state of being.
We’re talking about Erik Satie’s works for piano starting in the late 1800s, and the ideas borne of them. Famously, he called his quiet, minimalistic work Furniture Music, as his desire was to create pieces that you lived with, that resided in your home like a table or chair: to be used when you needed it, but to sit in a kind of stasis when you were occupied elsewhere.
“The melody is the Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form and the subject matter of a work,” the composer said of his overarching approach to composition. “The harmony is an illumination, an exhibition of the object, its reflection.”
Satie was an odd duck. Scores to his compositions included curious instructions for the player, such as “arm yourself with clairvoyance,” “bury the sound,” and, simply, “emaciated.” His composition “Vexations” included the instructions, “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, through serious immobility.”
In the early 1890s, Satie composed music for the occult sect Mystical Order of the Rose and Cross of the Temple and Grail. He later formed his own sect. Translated, it’s called the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor, and he remains the sect’s sole member. A lifelong drinker, Satie was an exquisite dresser but lived in squalor for most of his life.
That squalor wasn’t by necessity. He was a successful composer by the time he died in 1925 – but a terrible money manager.
Fast-forward three decades, when the Italian pianist Aldo Ciccolini recorded and released Erik Satie: Piano Music. A master interpreter of French impressionist music, Ciccolini compiled an album’s worth of Satie’s most striking pieces, including his thematically linked trio of miniatures called Trois Gymnopédies and another themed trio called Trois Gnossiennes.
The timing of the release couldn’t have been better. The Hi-Fi movement was just getting started, and few recordings sound more amazing on a quality system than Satie’s. That first collection sold millions of copies and remained in print for decades. Its cover illustration was created by Satie’s friend Pablo Picasso and an enclosed booklet featured illustrations by surrealist Jean Cocteau. The combined avant-garde firepower propelled Satie into the mainstream. Remarkably prolific, the success fueled Ciccolini and his American label Angel to record a follow-up, then another, then another. Across the next decade the pianist released seven volumes of Satie’s piano music, flooding the market with Satie’s music.
Those sales numbers remain relevant because it means that millions of vinyl copies are out there, and that this over-supply has kept the price low. You can snatch all seven volumes on Discogs for less than $50 total. If nothing else, you can pick up a copy of that first crucial volume for less than $5.