Safe at home has not necessarily meant sane at home. One antidote is a mega-dose of Erik Satie. The French composer’s most beguiling and languidly becalming piano pieces, particularly the inescapable ...

No one came closer to the early 20th-century avant-garde ideal that an artist’s creations and his life should be inseparable than did composer Erik Satie. A Paris Conservatory dropout who supported ...

In his splendid book on the French avant-garde during the 30 years preceding World War I, Roger Shattuck describes composer Erik Satie as “a musician more heard of than heard.” James Valcq is trying ...

Satie would, without doubt, come top of any list of eccentric composers. After all, can you imagine anyone else writing a set of Flabby Preludes for a Dog or Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear? His ...

If you forgot to celebrate Erik Satie’s 150th birthday on May 17, he forgives you. Really, he does. What’s that, you speak of a legacy worth honoring? A sesquicentenary? One imagines the urbane French ...

Erik Satie's music is better described by what it isn't than what it is. A contrarian, he wrote anti-emotional, anti-virtuosic and anti-Wagnerian music, basically rejecting all the major trends of ...