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product of a late 19 th -century period that prized virtuosity, but he was an unremarkable pianist and cared little for the showy displays of Romanticism. He was not as well known as contemporaries Debussy and Ravel, yet he was an acknowledged influence on both. A true eccentric, Satie collected umbrellas, and wore one of seven identical gray velvet suits each day (thus earning his nickname “The Velvet Gentleman”). He was a popular figure in cafes of Paris, as idolized by a younger generation of composers as he was reviled by critics. In many ways, Erik Satie was the world’s first alternative music star.
    Unlike any composer before him, Satie is significant as much for his approach to music as for his music itself. In this way, he paves a path for the many conceptual composers that have defined 20 th -century art music. Though his work was seldom performed during his lifetime – and is only slightly better known today – Satie’s break from traditional ideas of composition influenced modern music styles from musique concrète to minimalism, from ambient techno to trip-hop.
    Eric Bachmann, Archers of Loaf / Barry Black:
    He was very minimalist and so spacious in a time when everything around was Romantic and elaborate. Something about doing less to make the music more focused and pretty, I would like to say I’ve learned that from him.
    Eric Satie (he changed the spelling of his first name later) was born in 1866 in the French port town of Honfleur, and moved to Paris at age 12 with his father, an amateur composer who owned a music shop. Soon after, the young Satie entered the prestigious Paris Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition. It was a disappointing experience for everyone involved. Feeling held back by the musical conventions of the day, he called the conservatory a “penitentiary bereft of beauty.” Unimpressed by Satie’s development as a pianist, teachers described him as “a very unimportant pupil.”
    By his late teens, Satie was frequenting the Bohemian cafes of Paris’ Montmartre district and playing piano in nearby cabarets. The lively, melodic “pop” music he performed would prove influential when, around 1884, Satie began composing. Over the next decade he would pen what has turned out to be his best known material.
    Satie’s early piano compositions – including Trois Gymnopédies from 1888 and 1890’s Trois Gnossiennes – are marked by their simple beauty and concise melodicism. Slow and hypnotic, but at times dissonant and full of unresolved chord progressions, these pieces sound strangely modern, even today. Their nonlinear, montage-like structure defied 19 th -century rules of composition, and have more in common with modern collage styles. Tranquil and dreamy, the Gymnopédies have been adopted into the repertoire of New Age and Muzak, and seven decades before the minimalists adopted the modes and repetition of non-Western music, Satie’s Gnossiennes reveal an influence of oriental music (which he likely first heard, as did Debussy, at the 1889 World Fair in Paris).
    Eric Matthews:
    Satie’s always been a part of my listening habit. It’s tranquil, yet still harmonically challenging and exciting. He achieves a peaceful mood that I hope is in my music. The quietness, the solitude. It’s affected some of us [pop songwriters] very deeply and become part of our own moods in our music.
    With 1893’s Vexations , a short, neutral passage lasting one to two minutes, Satie created an important forerunner to avant-garde composition. Vexations ’ directions call for it to be repeated 840 times, which requires up to 28 hours to play. The piece may be the earliest example of a loop, those repeating musical phrases so common in electronic music.
    Alex Patterson, Orb:
    At the end of the night, after going to the acid house clubs back in ‘88, coming home and putting Satie on was like touching heaven, really, on an ambient front. It gave me a lot of confidence to go in and put