Satie, Erik

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enemy of all
establishments, including the musical. The comical titles that he attached to
his small piano pieces are characteristic of the Bohemian wit in the Paris of
his day. Irony and a deceptively childlike attitude, a dislike for pomposity of
all kinds, and an instinctive secretiveness were hallmarks of both the man and
his music. In 1916, Satie was befriended by Jean Cocteau and wrote the music
for a ballet, Parade, on which Pablo Picasso and Leonid Massine also
collaborated. By far the most important of Satie's works is Socrate , an harsh
setting for four sopranos and chamber orchestra of Plato's account of the death
of Socrates. The young composers who formed the essentially Parisian group
known as Les Six regarded Satie as a kind of tutelary genius, and in 1923 one of
them, Darius Milhaud, tried to found an "Ecole d'Arcueil," named for the obscure
Paris suburb where Satie lived in extreme ...

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