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“... One​ thing everyone knows about Erik Satie is that he was an eccentric. There are many kinds of eccentric and Satie was most of them. He presented himself as a nutty professor figure, not a composer but a ‘gymnopedist’ and ‘phonometrician’. He dined – or so he claimed in his autobiography – only on ‘food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals ...”

“... including gongs, tin cans, drums, buzzers, radios and coils of wire. Cage’s first mention of Erik Satie comes in a letter from 1944 to the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, Cage’s partner. Socrate, Satie’s piece for voice and piano, he enthuses, is ‘an incredibly beautiful work. There is no ...”

“... as Things Seen from Right and Left (Without Spectacles) and Chapters Turned in All Directions, Erik Satie (who once declared a desire for his music to resemble perfume) implied that he was mimicking in music the smashed perspectives of Cubism, but they were essentially moody miniatures for piano and violin. Respighi’s The Pines of Rome called for a ...”

“... Mixing these influences together, and adding one or two other ingredients (the café music of Erik Satie, whom Ravel met in 1893; the fashionable hispanism of Chabrier and Bizet, which I like to think stirred his Basque blood), he was able to concoct a state-of-the-art ‘French idiom’. One might even speculate that, like many repressed artists ...”