CDOTD 2/7/2023

 Erik Satie: Le Fils des Étoiles (The Complete Score) (LondonHALL)

Procured by trade with Gino Robair

My wife can read while the television is playing in the same room. I don't understand it. She'll even complain is the volume is turned down too low. Unlike me, she reads every day. 

I intend to get to some of the backlog of reading I've accumulated: biographies, Alfred Jarry, movie fanzines that have piled up. I recently bought Cosey Fanni Tutti's memoir, Art Sex Music, and wanted to dig into it. It's casually written in her voice, but quite long. I thought I'd spin some music in the background. It needed to be something especially ambient and unobtrusive, and this Satie work came to mind.

I wonder sometimes what most pianists think of Satie. His music can be almost anti-virtuosic. It all seems amazing to me because I can't really play piano at all, but the music in this piece has very little rhythm. Long passages are chords, played out in quarter and eighth note values, not particularly fast. 

After getting this disc in the mid-90s, I made a dub for my father. He thought it was a music that you could come in and out of without losing the point; it was the musical equivalent of watching clouds roll by.

Apart from his hours-long "Vexations", this is the longest (and only) extended composition by Satie, at over an hour in length. The shorter three preludes are more typical Satie, the longest plays out to about four and a half minutes. The three longer "acts" reference the preludes materials, and occasionally quote earlier Satie pieces (most notably his early "Gnossiennes"). It ambles by, harmonies hang without feeling the need to move along or resolve in any traditional way.

I have never been able to play the piano beyond a fundamental level, at best. I play almost no piano now, except to hear my own ideas or work out harmonies for transcription purposes. When I was regularly playing piano, I played some Satie works, stumbling through the "Gnossiennes", "Gymnopedies", and the first "Nocturne". For as poorly as I played those pieces, I liked that it was music that I enjoyed that I could at least approach playing. 

How do pianists in general feel about Satie? Someone such as Christopher Hobbs, the pianist on this disc, must be committed to Satie to play this extended work. It never reaches a level of dazzling virtuosity though, and I'm certain some pianists much find that frustrating. 

Speaking of frustrating, the disc started skipping somewhere in the middle. Ugh. On of all things, too. I'll have to try it in a different player.