Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard Read Online Free Page A

my hand on a piano and play sort of feminine chords.
    Vexations proved especially influential to John Cage , the leading figure in 20 th -century experimental music. Taking literally Satie’s instructions – ”to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities” – Cage was inspired to compose 4’33”, a piece where the performer sits silently at his instrument. And in 1963, Cage organized the first ever complete performance of Vexations , using an entire stable of pianists, including future Velvet Underground member John Cale . A more recent reprisal, in 1993, featured Soul Coughing’s Mark De Gli Antoni and composer LaMonte Young .
    Words were central to Satie’s expression. He wrote absurdist prose, bits of which showed up in the titles of compositions (such as Dried-Up Embryos or Three Pear-Shaped Pieces ) or were written on his scores as directions to the performer (for example, to play “like a nightingale with a toothache”). By the 1910s, these prose bits had become increasingly critical of 20 th -century life. His Bureaucratic Sonatina (1917) contains ironic running commentary such as “he dreams of promotion.”
    In 1917 Satie composed the surrealist ballet Parade , a collaboration with Pablo Picasso (scenery) and Jean Cocteau (scenario). Parade utilized typewriters, rattles, steamships whistles, pistol shots, and sirens – sounds of the modern world. This musique mechanique would later be utilized by everyone from composer Edgard Varese to rappers Public Enemy.
    Mark De Gli Antoni, Soul Coughing:
    Satie was a big, big influence philosophically. The way Satie stuck a typewriter in the middle of Parade . Take a Soul Coughing song like “Sugar Free Jazz”: I was like, “Why can’t a seagull become a lead guitar?” [The sample] still sounds like a seagull, but if I place it where traditionally some other lead instrument would speak, will you for a moment stop thinking it’s seagulls and accept it as the lead melodic element, in a traditional song way?
    Three years after mixing outside sounds into Parade , Satie attempted the opposite: to write music that would itself blend into the environment. Furniture Music , as he called his series of compositions, was meant strictly as background music. It was functional music for a modern society, meant to soften an aural environment polluted with clanging silverware and car horns. It was, essentially, the root of ambient music.
    Satie was still largely an outsider when he died of liver disease (he was a long-time alcoholic) in 1925, at age 59. By then, though, a small group of French composers known as Les Six (including Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger) had acknowledged Satie as their spiritual father. While Satie’s work fell even further out of mainstream consciousness in the middle decades of this century, his music began to reemerge in the 1960s, thanks both to the influence of John Cage and to the popular recordings made by concert pianist Aldo Ciccolini of Satie’s works.
    In recent years, Satie has been discovered by a growing number of rock musicians. In one year (1995-1996) Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 was sampled to great effect by both Folk Implosion (on the Kids soundtrack) and Drain, a side project of the Butthole Surfers’ King Coffey. As modern music catches up with Satie’s modernist visions, whole new generations are joining the Velvet Gentleman’s musical cult.

    SELECTED WORKS
    Trois Gymnopédies (1888) .
    Trois Gnossiennes (1890) .
    Vexations (1893) .
    Pieces froides (Cold Pieces) (1897) .
    Trois Morceaux en forme de poire (3 Pear-Shaped Pieces) (1903) .
    Le piége de Méduse (Medusa’s Trap) (1913) .
    Embryons desséchés (Dried-up Embryos) (1913) .
    Sports et divertissements (Sports and Diversions) (1914) .
    Parade (1917) .
    Sonatine bureaucratique (Bureaucratic Sonatina) (1917) .
    Socrate (1918) .
    Musique d’ameublement (Furniture Music) (1920) .
    Relâche (1924) .
    Cinéma Entr’acte symphonique