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WD_219/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 3 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0219 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"Cage’s Place In the Reception of Satie" - A paper by Matthew Shlomowitz.
As part of his Ph.D. at the University of California at San Diego, USA.
© 1999: Reprinted with kind permission.
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Note: Continued from the preceding "page" as "WD_218".
Cage’s place in Satie’s reception:
The question of how Cage has affected Satie's place in history is a difficult one to answer. The problem is that the question risks what Hacket-Ficher calls "The Fallacy of Metaphysical Questions" in his book "Historian's Fallacies"(47); that is, the attempt to resolve a non-empirical question empirically. And yet if we try too hard to avoid this problem, then we are left with nothing but conjecture and speculation. Clearly, a middle ground needs to be found where we can bring together the findings of the above and then make some observations
To suggest that there is a connection between Lambert and Cage is problematic as to my knowledge there is no evidence to support it. Yet, in terms of what each has written about Satie, there are some striking parallels. It is difficult to know if Lambert's book was being read in the USA at this time, but it is certainly possible that Cage could have got hold of it. Whether he did, or did not, read Lambert, is perhaps irrelevant; what we can say more assertively is that these two, and we can also add Virgil Thomson, Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars, have written about Satie very differently to Satie's biographers. It is interesting that Lambert, Thomson, Cage, Nyman and Bryars are all composers, and they are also all Englishmen or Americans.
When one considers how interesting, and eccentric a composer that Satie was, it is surprising that he has attracted such mundane biographers. Templier's, Myers's and Harding's books are all very straight-forward biographies. It is not that they necessarily attempt to remove, ignore or justify Satie's eccentricities (though there are examples of this too - remember Harding's skipping over of Vexations), they (Meyer's and Harding's particularly) just don't quite capture the spirit. A good example of this, is the above examples of the flowery, romanticized, prose each wrote regarding Gymnopédies.
Another characteristic of these biographers is a tendency to praise Satie on the grounds of his influence on other composers, rather than promoting the work itself. For instance, Meyer writes, "A lesser musician than that other great figure in twentieth century, Debussy, but a great prophet".(48) A further characteristic has been to place Satie, historically, in a context of being a kind-of neo-classicist. Satie has not been embraced whole-heartily as a neo-classicist probably for the simple reason that he did not take the old forms "seriously" as Stravinsky did; in a sense our definition of what a neo-classicist is takes Stravinsky as its model, and this is a model Satie does not fit into. Although he clearly had the sensibility of a classicist (predilections for heterophony, transparency of texture, clarity of form) he also had a love of the absurd and a problematic relationship with tradition. On one hand the middle-aged Satie thought enough of tradition to go back to school to learn counterpoint, yet equally by titles of the resulting works, such as Three Flabby Preludes, we can see a certain lack of reverence for tradition. The best example of his lack of veneration for tradition and the musical establishment is his ballet Relâche, which translates as "This Show is Closed". And furthermore, at the premier of this work, on the curtain was written the words "Erik Satie is the greatest musician in the world, whoever disagrees with this notion will please leave the hall". Now if Wagner or Scriabin (or in modern times, Stockhausen) had written their version of this statement at a premier of their work, we would have thought that it was an expression of their gigantic egos, but clearly with Satie, absurdity was the point - and the fun. So as musicologists have found it difficult to label Satie a neo-classicist; it has been easier to simply to say that he was against things, namely Debussy's impressionism and Wagner's romanticism.
To my knowledge, Cage never discussed Satie in the context of impressionism, neo-classicism or romanticism. Constant Lambert does advance the idea that Satie was a neo-classicist. He states that the music is completely lacking in "romanticism, pictorialism, or dramatic atmosphere"(49), and the "reaction against Impressionism with its appeal to the nerves; the insistence on line, not colour [sic]; the development of popular melodies and forms; the revival of fugal devices – all these typical traits of the post-war movement [viz., neo-classicism] are found in Satie …".(50) But he does not dwell on this categorization, and as we have shown above with his statements regarding parallax in Satie’s work, he has some striking insights into the music itself.
Virgil Thomson did not, in scholarly terms, write about Satie. Rather, he promoted Satie’s work by organizing concerts of the music. Most notably he organized, and as a pianist played in, the first American performance of Socrate (tenor and piano arrangement) in the mid 1920s. And in 1936, The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music, of which he was a member, organized the first performance of the orchestral version in America. The same group arranged a performance of the silent film Cinéma (Entr’acte) with the live music Satie composed for it. And as a critic for various publications, Thomson always spoke highly of Satie’s work; indeed, it was his belief that Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Satie where the "representative figures in modern music."(51)
That Satie has been written about differently by composers is perhaps no surprise. Music historians are typically interested in positioning a composer – whether that be to pigeon-hole a composer in a movement of the time, or to see that composer as a forerunner for developments that occurred later - whereas composers are generally more interested in the music, de-contextualized. And as we saw with Cage, often a composer’s take on this music is very personal and says as much about them as it does their subject. Interestingly, Skulsky (the author of the article about Satie printed in Musical America that Cage responded to) sums it up beautifully in his response to Cage’s first letter. He writes, "When a composer is related to another composer in character and aesthetic, the judged composer becomes a centrifuge of enthusiasm for the judging composer; the latter tends to regard the works of the former as musically valid in themselves, without reference to surroundings, time, or social significance."(52) While on the contrary, "a critic – especially when he is considering a composer of the past – must take into account various factors of historical development. He must try to find out whether the subject of his judgement was a man of his time, with a normal place in society as it then existed, or whether he was ahead of his time, writing works that were valid only for some later generation."(53)
Criticism has certainly changed since 1951 when Skulsky wrote these words. In our time, we have become increasingly self-conscious and suspicious of assumptions that lay tacit in scholarship. The most extreme angle on this is when writers such as Michel Foccault become more interested in the way facts are interpreted in a particular time, than the facts themselves.(54) Indeed, this paper, and reception history generally, is a product of this shift; that is, the emphasis of this paper is on what has happened to Satie’s work rather than on the work itself. Nonetheless, Skulsky’s observation remains relevant, as most of the scholarship we have discussed was written before this shift. The fact that so much of the writing about Satie, be it by musicologists or composers, has been done by English rather than French speakers, is also interesting. Satie’s legacy amongst French composers would have been guaranteed if it were not for the colossal compositional shift following the World War II. That is, in the decade or so before Satie’s death, many young French composers became interested in Satie. As Peter Dickinson states, "Almost every twentieth century French composer has acknowledged some debt to him …".(55) There is, of course, the well documented Les Six which featured (and you can see by their year of death in parentheses how for the legacy reached in this group of enthusiasts): Auric (1983), Durey (1979), Honneger (1955), Milhaud (1974), Poulenc (1963) and Tailleferre (1983). And though he died earlier, Ravel (1937) also promoted Satie’s work, as Debussy (1918) had done earlier.
Following the second world war, the music of all of these composers was suddenly of no interest to the young generation of composers that sprung up around the Darmstadt Festival of New Music. Most text books will tell you that the important young composer’s of this time - Boulez, Cage, Nono, Stockhausen etc. – were inspired by the modernists of the first half of the twentieth century: Berg, Schoenberg, Varese and Webern; composers even of the stature of Debussy, Hindemith, Prokofiev, lest someone-like Satie, fell completely out of favor. Cage’s interest in Satie is alluded to in these text books, but almost invariably dramatically down-played, and we have seen how passionately Cage was interested in Satie at this time. Without wanting to be accused of another of Hacket-Ficsher’s fallacies – The Fallacy of the Fictional Questions (i.e. counterfactuals) – it is interesting to ponder what the fate of Satie’s reception would have been if it where not for the Darmstadters.
And as we saw with Vexations, when broad interest in Satie re-surfaced in the mid 1960s it was largely in America and England. What is especially interesting about the Vexations phenomenon, is that the "Satie" that was so fascinating to this new group of enthusiasts, is that in a sense it was a different "Satie", that Lambert and Thomson were promoting. Furthermore, John Cage, with his friendship with Thomson and Sauguet (the composer who showed Cage Vexations) is a connection between each of these generations.
In Place of a Conclusion:
John Cage has affected Satie’s reception. As I have been at pains to point out throughout, the degree to which we can assert this is difficult to quantify. Nonetheless, what we can assert, is that Cage was a committed enthusiast of Satie’s work, and the many people that have taken an interest in Cage have also taken an interest in his interests. This is not always the case. For instance, although Schoenberg was interested in Brahms, and wrote a famous article on how Brahms was, contrary to the established view, a progressive, we can not say that the people who took an interest in Schoenberg (e.g. Boulez, Stockhausen etc.) have taken an interest in Brahms. Clearly, Brahms’ place in the music world is far more solid than Satie’s, so it is not surprising that Schoenberg’s article didn’t have the same effect. But then again Schoenberg only wrote a solitary article about Brahms, whereas, as we have seen, Cage’s engagement with Satie was extensive, and involved every aspect of his musical life - as a writer, composer, pianist, and concert organizer.
Footnotes:
(1) Gavin Bryars, "'Vexations' and its Performers" in Contact, Spring 1983, p12-20.
(2) Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson: On the Aisle, W.W.Norton & Co., New York, 1997, p81.
(3) David Revill, The Roaring Silence, Bloomsbury, London, 1992, p94.
(4) Michael Nyman, "Cage and Satie" in Musical Times, 1973, p68.
(5) Jann Pasler, "Inventing a Trdition: Cage’s composition in retrospect", in John Cage: a composer in America (ed. M. Perloff and C. Juckermann), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p45.
(6) Nyman, p68.
(7) John Cage, "Defense of Satie" in John Cage (edited by Richard Kostelanetz), Praeger Publishers, New York, 1970, p80.
(8) Cage, "Defense of Satie", p81.
(9) Cage, "Defense of Satie", p81.
(10) Cage, "Defense of Satie", p81.
(11) John Cage, "Satie Controversy", in John Cage (edited by Richard Kostelanetz), Praeger Publishers, New York, 1970, p89.
(12) Cage, "Satie Controversy", p90.
(13) Cage, "Satie Controversy", p92.
(14) Cage, "Satie Controversy", p93.
(15) Revill, p95.
(16) Erik Satie quoted in: Pierre-Daniel Templier, Erik Satie (trans. Elena L. French and David S. French), MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1969 (original 1932).
(17) Darius Milhaud quoted in: Orledge, Robert, Satie Remembered, Amadeus Press, Portland, 1995.
(18) Nyman, p70.
(19) John Cage, "Erik Satie" (first appeared in the 1958 Art News Annual), Silence, Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, 1976 (first pub. 1973), p76.
(20) Cage, "Erik Satie", p77.
(21) Cage, "Erik Satie", p77.
(22) Cage, "Erik Satie", p 82.
(23) Bryars, p15.
(24) Merce Cunningham, "Music and Dance" in Writings About John Cage (edited by Richard Kostelanetz), The University of Michigan Press, 1993.
(25) Nyman, p66.
(26) Satie quoted in: Cage, "Erik Satie", p80.
(27) Peter Dickinson, review in Music Quarterly, Vol.75, No.1, Fall 1991, p104.
(28) Constant Lambert, Music Ho!, Hogarth Press, London, 1985, p115.
(29) Lambert, p115.
(30) Lambert, p115.
(31) Lambert, p119.
(32) Pierre-Daniel Templier, Erik Satie (trans. Elena L. French and David S. French), MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1969 (original 1932), p76.
(33) Rollo Meyers, Erik Satie, Dennis Dobson, 1948, p69.
(34) Meyers, Erik Satie, p5.
(35) Lambert, p119.
(36) Wilfred Mellers, "Erik Satie and the ‘problem’ of contemporary music" in Music and Letters, Vol 23, no.3 (July 1942), p223.
(37) James Harding, Erik Satie, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1975, p69.
(38) Harding, p31.
(39) Meyers, Erik Satie, p5.
(40) Norman Demuth, Musical Trends in the Twentieth Century, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1975 (first published in 1952), p8.
(41) Demuth, p25.
(42) Paul Griffiths, Modern Music: A Concise History, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1994 (first published in 1974), p70.
(43) Twentieth Century Music (edited by Rollo Meyers), Culder and Boyars, London, 1968, p18.
(44) Robert P Morgan, Twentieth Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe, W.W Norton & Co, New York, 1991, p50.
(45) Webster's New World Dictionary of Music (edited by Richard Kassel), MacMillan, New York, p459.
(46) Webster's New World Dictionary of Music, p431.
(47) Hacket Fischer, Historian's Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1970, p12.
(48) Meyers, Erik Satie, p43.
(49) Lambert, p115.
(50) Lambert, p117.
(51) Tommasini, p127.
(52) Abraham Skulsky, "Satie Controversy", in John Cage (edited by Richard Kostelanetz), Praeger Publishers, New York, 1970, p91.
(53) Skulsky, p91.
(54) Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1994 (first published in 1986), p287.
(55) Peter Dickinson, "Erik Satie (1866-1925) in The Music Review, Vol. 28, No.2 (May 1967), p139.
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