Walking through the streets of Paris a hundred years
ago, Erik Satie could not have looked more normal in
his black bowler hat and tie. But Mr. Satie was
dreaming of music no one had heard before – music
like ancient chants and modern circus tunes rolled into
one. A friend of poets, puppeteers, magicians, great
painters like Picasso, and the Surrealists, Satie was
at the center of a world where sense was nonsense, and
the imagination ruled supreme.
Erik Satie's first great piano perio...(+)
Walking through the streets of Paris a hundred years
ago, Erik Satie could not have looked more normal in
his black bowler hat and tie. But Mr. Satie was
dreaming of music no one had heard before – music
like ancient chants and modern circus tunes rolled into
one. A friend of poets, puppeteers, magicians, great
painters like Picasso, and the Surrealists, Satie was
at the center of a world where sense was nonsense, and
the imagination ruled supreme.
Erik Satie's first great piano period dates back to his
youth and his first time spent in Montmartre. During
these years he wrote some 20 piano pieces, five songs,
some sketches for string quartet, theatre music for
Joséphin Péladan and a little orchestral piece, later
re-used as the penultimate movement in Trois morceaux
en forme de poire for piano duet.
His works swing widely between audacity and tenderness,
irony and mysticism, reflective of a personality whose
effervescence and eccentricity can be discerned even in
his earliest works. The preface to his very first
published piano compositions, for example, boasts of
the works' grace, easy elegance, and "tendency toward
reverie," while the title of one of the works, the
Valse-ballet, is appended with the comically inflated
opus number 62. A composer with a habit of fulfilling
obligations by affixing new opus numbers to old pieces,
the Op. 62 inaugurates Satie's infamous practice of
using irreverent titles -- see also, for example,
Indiscreet Blunder, 1909, and Flabby Preludes (for a
dog), from 1912, both for piano. The Valse-ballet
appeared in print in 1887 alongside another solo piano
piece, Fantaisie-Valse, under the joint title Musique
des Familles; both works are thought to have been
composed two years earlier, thus predating in
conception the better-known and more serious four
pieces Ogives (1886). Unassuming in its expressive
scope, the Valse-ballet takes a simple ABA form built
of clear, clean-cut phrases and dapper, meandering
melodies. The call and answer feel of the main tune is
articulated through lucid, cadential gestures, as well
as through the characteristic pause on the upswing that
disrupts the triple-meter momentum between phrases, and
in the second half of the outer sections in a coy
melodic alternation between upper and lower octaves.
Announced by an overly officious chordal interlude, the
middle section is rather less predictable, with greater
melodic interplay between the right and left hands, and
with considerably more variability in phrase lengths as
repeated thematic gestures overrun their allotted
portion of one measure and tumble into the next. Here
Satie makes greater use of syncopation and hemiola, as
well, creating a sound akin to the popular Latin-tinged
piano works of Gottschalk, or even the jaunty
polyrhythmic gestures of early ragtime. An even more
flowery chordal interlude affords the harmonic
transition back to the opening music, which repeats as
before to draw the piece to its close
Source: Wikipedia
(https://www.allmusic.com/composition/valse-ballet-for-
piano-mc0002368243 ).
Although originally written for Solo Piano, I created
this Interpretation of the "Valse-Ballet" for Flute &
Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).
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