Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (1866 – 1925), who signed
his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer
and pianist. He was the son of a French father and a
British mother. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire,
but was an undistinguished student and obtained no
diploma. In the 1880s he worked as a pianist in
café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing
works, mostly for solo piano, such as his Gymnopédies
and Gnossiennes. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian
sect to which he was...(+)
Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (1866 – 1925), who signed
his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer
and pianist. He was the son of a French father and a
British mother. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire,
but was an undistinguished student and obtained no
diploma. In the 1880s he worked as a pianist in
café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing
works, mostly for solo piano, such as his Gymnopédies
and Gnossiennes. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian
sect to which he was briefly attached.
In the view of the Oxford Dictionary of Music, Satie's
importance lay in "directing a new generation of French
composers away from Wagner?influenced impressionism
towards a leaner, more epigrammatic style". Debussy
christened him "the precursor" because of his early
harmonic innovations. Satie summed up his musical
philosophy in 1917: "To have a feeling for harmony is
to have a feeling for tonality… the melody is the
Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form and the
subject matter of a work. The harmony is an
illumination, an exhibition of the object, its
reflection.".
Chapitres tournés en tous sens (Chapters Turned Every
Which Way) is a 1913 piano composition by Erik Satie.
One of his humoristic keyboard suites of the 1910s, it
was published by the firm E. Demets that year. Ricardo
Viñes gave the premiere at the Salle Erard in Paris on
January 14, 1914. Satie announced the title of this
suite as an upcoming project in his April 1913
advertisement in the periodical Le Guide du concert,
although he did not begin sketching the music until
late August. On September 16 he wrote to his protégé
Alexis Roland-Manuel with ironic bluster, "I have just
completed the Chapitres tournés en tous sens. I
consider this a great triumph". As with most of Satie's
piano suites from this time, the Chapitres is a trilogy
of unrelated pieces. The melodic lines are kept simple
through the borrowings from operettas and children's
songs, but backed up by Satie's unique and often
experimental harmonic sense.
A little narrative preface picks up where the title
("Le porteur de grosses pierres" -- The carrier of
large stones) leaves off, offering us glimpses of the
protagonist: He carries them on his back. He smirks and
looks very sure of himself. His strength amazes the
little children. We see him transporting an enormous
stone, a hundred times bigger than himself. (It is a
pumice stone). The cocky laborer goes about his job
accompanied by another borrowed operetta melody, "Vive
la Paresse" ("Long Live Laziness") from Robert
Planquette's Rip (1884). But a second narrative between
the staves of the score shows he is vainly trying to
hide his struggle with the burden. Shedding its
confident tone the music begins to stagger, and in the
suite's loudest moment the hauler drops the stone with
a blunt fortissimo crash. The punchline of the preface
had a double meaning for Satie. One of his personal
quirks was that he never washed his hands with soap,
but with pumice stone.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapitres_tourn%C3%A9s_e
n_tous_sens).
Although originally composed for Solo Piano, I created
this Interpretation of "Le porteur de grosses pierres"
(The carrier of large stones) from "Chapitres Tournés
en Tous Sens" (Chapters Turned in All Directions) for
Marimba (Single Staff) and Piano.
