Erik Satie was a late 19th/early 20th century French composer whose work you almost certainly have heard without knowing who it was by (a constant for me who doesn’t know much about classical music) - if you listen to his Gymnopedies or Gnossiennes (nonsense words that he made up), you’ll probably recognise them from a thousand adverts selling anything from coffee to package holidays.
Music critic Ian Penman writes an unusual biography of the composer in Erik Satie Three Piece Suite wherein he divides up the book into three pieces (“3” was important to Satie): the first part is a straightforward biographical essay; the second part is an A-Z of Satie, a sort of Devil’s Dictionary of important elements that made up his life; the third part is a diary Penman kept when he was researching/writing the book from 2022 to 2024.
I appreciate the unconventional, creative and original approach taken for this book - entirely appropriate for the subject matter - but I would’ve preferred a simpler, ie. less stylistic, treatment of this fascinating artist.
But who was Erik Satie? A pioneer of the genre that would morph into easy listening or muzak (he called it “furniture music”), he was one of the first film composers, his pieces were short (many were roughly 3 minutes or less, like modern pop music singles), he always wore a bowler hat and umbrella, he was part of the Surrealist and Dada artistic movements, hanging out with the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Picasso, he was terrible with money and lived in squalor despite his dandyish appearance and doing quite well in his career later in life, he lived in the southern Parisian suburb of Arcueil for the last 25 years of his life and is where he was buried, and he died of alcoholism shortly before his 60th birthday.
The essay that makes up the first part is excellent - Penman knows how to perfectly write about his subjects in this format in a way that is informative, beguiling and balanced. I wouldn’t have minded if this treatment had been applied to the entire book.
Because the A-Z dictionary of Satie is much less satisfying. The short-entry format makes the reading very staccato in its rhythm. That style is why I rarely enjoy reading diary or letter books much. Some of the entries made me aware of interesting figures like Jean Cocteau and Paul Klee, as well as Satie’s strangest piece of music, Vexations, which repeats 840 times. Mostly though, this section was slow going and I don’t think this style did anything to better understanding of Satie than a traditional biographical approach would have done.
The third part, that is Penman’s diary of writing this book, was easily the worst part here. I learned little to nothing about Satie and all I got out of it was finding out that Penman doesn’t think much of the phrase “be the best version of yourself”. A pointless addition and a poor way to close out the book.
Ian Penman is a brilliant music critic and a helluva writer but I don’t think he had the material for an entire book on Erik Satie. That first essay is enough and if the rest of the book was made up of similarly-sized essays on other artists, this would be a better book. As it is, it’s a decent biography of Satie - I learned about as much of the artist as I’m likely to - although the playful stylistic approach, while fitting given the subject, ends up bringing down the quality of the book rather than improve it. Beyond the first part, the book is a chore to get through and, while I’m not going to check out any more Satie biographies, I’m sure the others that are out there are better to read than Ian Penman’s Erik Satie Three Piece Suite.
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