Satie, Budd, AFX, & the Pursuit of Musical Beauty

thoughts on the life-changing power of the right note in the right place

Once in a while a piece of music makes such an impression on me it creates a new category in my mind. Sometimes the music is literally of a kind I have never heard before, and sometimes it conveys a special feeling more intensely than I’ve ever felt it. In a small way, after experiencing it for the first time, I think, “Life is different now.”

When I was 16 or 17, my brother Merrick put on a CD of a piano recording of the Trois Gymnopédies by Erik Satie. Within a few notes, I was staring at the speakers in a state of slack-jawed wonder.

This was the platonic ideal of musical-beauty-streaked-with-melancholy, and its particular mix of feelings seemed to capture some essential truth about life and death. Everything about it was perfect, each emotional gesture rendered with the smallest possible number of elements. If there were one fewer note it wouldn’t land; one more would be superfluous. It had to be heard on piano, the central tool for Western musical structure, and it had to be the instrument alone.

Later, I saw someone describe the pieces as like viewing a single sculpture from three different angles and that unlocked something too, showed me how language can both reflect and shape the experience of music, and I’ve borrowed/stolen that image a few times in my own writing over the years.

After that first encounter I heard Trois Gymnopédies many times, often not by choice. I learned that these pieces had long been used for advertising and as background in film and television, and that, for many, their ubiquity rendered them banal. Not me though. The magic remained, and I’ve sought out music that was “like” Satie’s piano music ever since, in the same way I later sought music “like” Boards of Canada or “like” My Bloody Valentine. It had defined an approach to music and I couldn’t help but seek out more of it, even as the intensity of that original impression remained elusive.

This pursuit led to a minor teenage obsession with George Winston, a phrase that looks very sad when I see the words appearing in front of me now. I should have been listening to something like Lansing’s Crucifucks alongside my fellow alienated teenagers but there I was, hitting the "back” button on my Autumn CD so I could hear “Woods” again. I can’t hide from my truth.

I moved to Keith Jarrett (this great book by Peter Elsdon has a chapter comparing Jarrett’s work to Winston’s, a comparison Jarrett has always hated) and Bill Evans (his “Peace Piece” could be the most sublime piece of piano music I’ve heard; Winston’s fellow Windham Hill artist Liz Story recorded a nice version of it). I heard the Satie pieces in many configurations, including a take by Evans and Herbie Mann on their album Nirvana. After that, I encountered the work of Harold Budd, first through his association with Brian Eno. His album La Bella Vista, which appears to be out of print everywhere and only available presently on YouTube, may be the best album-length exploration of the Satie feel I’ve heard.

When I was 18 or 19 I bought a double CD of Chopin’s Nocturnes based only on something I read that compared them to Satie—they were great, but too dynamic for what I was looking for. I learned that John Cage’s early piano music carries a great deal of this emotion I’m trying to describe—he worshiped Satie and titled pieces after him, so that’s no surprise.

And then somewhere in the ’90s I discovered the music of Richard D. James, aka the Aphex Twin. He loved Trois Gymnopédies too and sometimes you could hear it in his music. Last week I wrote a piece on “Flim” for Pitchfork’s relatively new Saturday Tracks feature (I also wrote one on New Order “Ceremony”) and I touched on the Aphex—>Satie connection. The single record of his that most evinces his love of the French composer is probably Drukqs, which I’ve been listening to quite a bit in the past few months. But I can hear it in “Flim,” too, along with what might be the most emotionally resonant drum programming I’ve heard (I touched on this quality in an earlier newsletter about Jim White).

For critics, beauty is hard to trust. I think a lot about musical surfaces and texture as a locus of meaning but I’m often unsure about the relationship between beauty and quality. Ultimately, when writing about music I tend to start with how it makes me feel and I think about its history, context, and artistic intent later. Sometimes, what I learn affects my response, but sometimes the initial reaction remains and I have to honor it. This is partly why, for example, I’m interested in the challenge of regarding new age music as “art,” how easy it is to dismiss and how people who like to think about music find value in it.

Last year, Ian Penman wrote a delightful book about Satie called Three Piece Suite. His writing often makes me jealous because he seems to move leisurely from one thought to the next, stringing together interesting ideas with no concern for form. Since his writing has the warmth of conversation, his offhand manner can fool me into thinking what he is doing is easy, and it makes me want to try doing it myself. When I get deeper into one of his books, I see how the observations fit together and that structure is deliberate and logical, just differently shaped.

One section of Three Piece Suite is a kind of glossary/encyclopedia, with Penman riffing on aspects of Satie’s music, personal obsessions, milieu, and more. Here’s an example I like:

TYPEWRITER (1)
Early typewriters, with their circular pad of spoked letters, constitute a kind of inverted visual or technical rhyme with the umbrella.

There’s not much to it, but the image of a typewriter as a visual rhyme for an umbrella scratches an itch in my brain. I’m in thrall to the dark art of Noticing Things.

And here’s a bit that triggered a “That’s it!” clang in my head when I read it:

The Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes do not sound like nineteenth-century concert hall music; they sound like pieces composed by someone who knew there would one day be recording studios, CDs, downloads. They feel as old as sand, but strangely contemporary.

It’s something I forgot from that first listen to the Gymnopédies: the quiet, the space, the importance of silence. This was music for CD. The hundreds of recordings of it that were made before the early ’80s were rendered obsolete when the first digital version rendered it into 1s and 0s. In a distant and impressionistic way, it seems like computer music, which makes the Aphex Twin connection that much clearer. There should be no surface noise, nothing additional. Satie included everything that was needed.