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.
In the enigmatic finale the text spans millennia to
unite two prisoners yearning for their freedom: the
biblical Jonah from the belly of the whale, and the
18th Century schemer Jean Henri Latude from the
Bastille, where he spent many years (when not escaping)
for attempting to swindle Madame de Pompadour. Satie
quotes the children's folk song Nous n'irons plus aux
bois ("We will go to the woods no more"), a tune that
had haunted his friend Claude Debussy for much of his
career, notably in Jardins sous la pluie from his piano
suite Estampes; and the piece is dedicated to Debussy's
wife, singer Emma Bardac. Pianist Viñes, who premiered
the Estampes in 1903, would have gotten these
connections, but what they meant for Satie is open to
question. Did he, as Robert Orledge speculated, think
of Debussy as an imprisoned man after his controversial
marriage to Bardac? If so this would have made the
dedication painfully ironic. At any rate there are no
attempts here to quote Debussy's music or mimic his
style.
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 "Regrets des enfermés - Jonas
et Latude" (Lament of the Confined - Jonah and Latude)
from "Chapitres Tournés en Tous Sens" (Chapters Turned
in All Directions) for Marimba (Single Staff) and
Piano.
PARTITION