FROZEN MUSIC

摘要

Erik Satie, composer, writer and eccentric was born in Honfleur, Normandy, and spent most of his life in Paris in the heady days of La Belle Epogue surrounded by the decadence of Montmartre, absinthe and Le Chat Noir. Much of his work was acclaimed only after his death, his oeuvre being a curious mix of challenging and quirky short pieces that have been characterised as early-Surrealist. In a Guardian article, minimalist composer John Cage said that Satie was 'indispensable' to the development of music and musical experimentation. For many, his posthumous fame rests primarily with his Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes published at the end of the 19th century: delightful, mournful and atmospheric. To paraphrase Cage, Satie was an early exponent of ambient music. Satie joined the leftist cliques of the Parisian art scene, accentuating his bohemian lifestyle and colourful personality. In later life, he worked variously with Man Ray, Cocteau and Braque among others and dabbled with Dadaism and absurdism. The director of the Cheltenham Festival has written that Satie 'bought seven identical, grey velvet corduroy suits which he proceeded to wear, with no variation, for 10 years'. As was fitting to his melancholic musical catalogue, he died of cirrhosis at 59, alone in a grubby suburban bedsit in 1925. Erik Satie never went to China, yet this is where his true house stands. It is a generous Modernist home that the architect, Wang Yun, says Satie would have deserved. As a composer of musical fragments, he might have appreciated the fact that the building is unfinished.