50 Moments that Rocked the Classical Music World by Darren Henley

Author:Darren Henley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908739735
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson

A NEW POLISH: ‘FURNITURE MUSIC’

There is a need to create furniture music: that is to say, music that would be a part of the surrounding noises and that would take them into account.’ So wrote the French composer Erik Satie in early 20th-century Paris, after spending an afternoon having lunch with his friend, the artist Fernand Léger. Satie believed that this music would perform a very particular purpose in hiding the everyday noises of dining in a busy urban setting.

This could mark the first time a composer positively welcomed the idea of ‘background music’ – at least since the 16th century and Tafelmusik or Musique de table, which was intended as an aural complement to feasts and banquets. Here, Satie was not just accepting, but actually endorsing, the fact that music could be used as an accompaniment to doing something else. This paved the way for an army of imitators during the course of the century that followed.

Erik Satie was admittedly the most eccentric composer of the early 20th century: his collection of silk handkerchiefs was legendary, and his frankly bizarre titles for pieces of music (Three Flabby Preludes for a Dog being an apt case in point) demonstrate his unusual nature well. After all, it’s not without good reason that the humorist and close friend of Satie, Alphonse Allais, once gave him the nickname Esotérik Satie. But that doesn’t mean his idea for furniture music should be dismissed. Once you strip away the quirkiness, there lies within a clever and thought-provoking suggestion about how classical music could or should relate to life in general.

Shortly after espousing his theory for the first time, Satie fleshed out the notion of furniture music to his friend Jean Cocteau: ‘Musique d’ameublement – Furniture Music – for law offices, banks, etc. . . . No marriage ceremony without furniture music . . . do not enter a house which does not have furniture music.’

It was a bold and extreme vision, but Satie was making the point that classical music should not necessarily be restricted to the concert hall alone. On the contrary, what is inherently wrong about a composer writing music to be used as the background to something else? Satie himself composed various pieces for use as furniture music: during his lifetime, one of the most successful was a set of short works, all of which took melodies by other well-known French composers, including Camille Saint-Saëns, and reworked them in a new way. These pieces were designed to be heard during the intermission of a Parisian play in 1920, with the audience being encouraged to take a look at a selection of children’s drawings while letting the music wash over them. But, in practice, many of the assembled crowd instead stopped to listen to the live musicians, much to the consternation of the composer, who insisted they talk, mingle and discuss the art in front of them rather than pause to take the music on board.

Around the turn of the century, Satie had built up a great deal of experience as a cabaret pianist in Paris.

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