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.
Satie left extensive sketches for the text of "Celle
qui parle trop" (She Who Talks Too Much), a sign of the
growing importance the verbal element was assuming in
his piano suites. A lady drags her husband through a
department store, wearing him down with her purchases
and gossip. Dizzying triplets illustrate her inane
chatter ("I want a hat of solid mahogany", "Mrs.
Thingummy has an umbrella made of bone", "Miss
Whats-her-face has married a man as dry as a cuckoo")
while her exasperated spouse grumbles to the tune of
"Ne parle pas, Rose, je t'en supplie" ("Rose, do not
speak, I beg you") from Aimé Maillart's operetta Les
dragons de Villars (1856). This theme slows to a
chromatically distorted end as the husband drops dead
from exhaustion. The wife falls silent at last, and the
man's final breath is quietly expelled with an
unresolved eleventh chord.
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 "Celle qui parle trop" (She Who
Talks Too Much) from "Chapitres Tournés en Tous Sens"
(Chapters Turned in All Directions) for Marimba (Single
Staff) and Piano.
