Don’t we all want to be happy?

In​ 1888, two soon to be famous composers completed their earliest significant works. In Leipzig, where he was employed as second conductor at the Stadttheater, Gustav Mahler put the finishing touches to what would later be known as his Symphony No. 1. These days performed as a four-movement work, it received its premiere in Budapest as a five-movement ‘symphonic poem’. When this first outing proved unsuccessful, Mahler made some radical revisions, overloading the piece with programmatic information, including a new title – Titan: A Tone Poem in Symphonic Form – and an elaborate framework of allusions to Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs (1797). Clocking in at just over an hour (fairly modest by his later standards), it is a quintessential work of Germanic late Romanticism: dense, chromatic, thickly textured, ambitious, scored for an uncompromisingly large orchestra and developing its themes with time-consuming thoroughness and deliberation.

Meanwhile, in Paris, a self-effacing young man of 22 – one of whose pieces of advice to composers would be to ‘keep it short’ – dashed off three miniature piano pieces, to which he gave the mysterious title Gymnopédies (it refers to a dance performed by naked young Spartan men). They are works of radical, pellucid naivety. In the first and most celebrated, the wistful main theme unfolds over simple (but, for their time, unusual) major seventh chords. This theme never develops: instead, it is repeated. The atmosphere is one of perfect calm and melancholy serenity. There are no changes in dynamics. The tune is stated, and then it’s gone. It’s all over in about two and a half perfect minutes.

By themselves, Satie’s three pieces could not have precipitated a musical revolution, and seen off the forces of Wagnerian bombast and Mahlerian excess. The Gymnopédies broke through largely because they found two influential champions. The first was Claude Debussy, who in 1897 orchestrated the first and third pieces (although Satie grumbled about the praise lavished on Debussy’s delicate textures and timbres: ‘Why won’t he allow me just a little corner of his shade? … I don’t want to take any of his sun’). The second was Maurice Ravel, a stalwart champion of Satie, who in 1910 founded the Société musicale indépendante (SMI) in Paris as a counterblast to the stuffy conservatism of the Société nationale de musique, and wasted little time in programming Satie’s work. At the opening concert of the SMI’s second season, Ravel himself performed the Prelude to the First Act of Le Fils des étoiles, the second Sarabande and the third Gymnopédie. The programme note – which Ravel probably didn’t write, though it certainly reflected his views – said of Satie’s early compositions (by now almost a quarter of a century old, a long time in the fast-evolving musical landscape of the Belle Époque) that they ‘surprise by their anticipation of modernist vocabulary and by the almost prophetic character of certain harmonic discoveries’. The note remarked that the Sarabande’s date of composition – 1887 – was ‘amazing’, and hailed its composer as a ‘subtle researcher’ and a man who had spoken ‘the daring “slang” of the future’. (Satie was conscious of the debt he owed Ravel for bringing his work back into circulation, and in 1912 repaid it with a letter, written after hearing the expanded and fully orchestrated ballet version of Ma mère l’Oye, in which he called Ravel a ‘magnificent artist’ and ‘my dear friend’ – although eight years later, in a letter to Georges Auric, he would refer to him as ‘un con’.)

On these and other occasions, the younger members of the French musical establishment wielded the Gymnopédies as a potent weapon against the Germanic solemnity and ponderousness they loathed; in the process, they lent these pieces a prominence they might otherwise never have attained. The rest is by now well-trodden history. Satie’s three piano pieces changed the harmonic vocabulary of 20th-century music. The major seventh chord became ubiquitous, first in jazz, then in pop music. Repetition, rather than development, became the guiding principle of composition. Satie is the progenitor of torch songs and lounge music, systems music and minimalism, even (with his later innovation, ‘musique d’ameublement’) muzak and ambient music. Mahler’s influence, by comparison, has been non-existent. Arthur Honegger – the most serious and ‘Germanic’ of the young composers who gathered not always admiringly around Satie under the soubriquet of ‘Les Six’ – saw what was coming, and didn’t like it. In 1951 he wrote:

Think of Erik Satie’s music, which some musicians look upon as genius, and the degree to which it reverts to a primitive simplification of language – an absence of harmonic richness, an absence of contrapuntal richness. At the rate at which we are going, before the end of the century we shall have a very scanty and barbaric music, combining a rudimentary melody with brutally stressed rhythms – marvellously suited to the atrophied ears of the music lovers of the year 2000!

One of the great strengths of Ian Penman’s new book about Satie is that it barely concerns itself with any of this. Unlike Honegger, he is preoccupied not by Satie’s influence on other composers, or even solely by his aesthetic, but by his whole personality, his entire way of being in the world. Honegger’s complaint comes from a book called I Am a Composer – a bald statement of self-identification. Satie, let us remember, never referred to himself as a composer at all. At the outset of a magnificently self-mocking essay called ‘What I Am’ (collected in A Mammal’s Notebook, Ornella Volta’s anthology of Satie’s prose), he writes:*

Anyone will tell you that I am not a musician. They are right. From the beginning of my career I immediately classified myself as a phonometrographer. My work is pure phonometrics … In fact it gives me more pleasure to measure a sound than to hear one. With my phonometer in hand, I work with joy and with assurance … The first time I used a phonoscope, I examined a middling-sized B flat. I can assure you, I have never seen anything more revolting. I called my servant to have him look.

Hard to imagine the sombre Honegger writing such nonsense (or indeed, reading it with any pleasure). But for Penman, this is the very essence of Satie. His book is not a biography, nor is it an essay on the music. In its frank, conversational, seemingly haphazard way it is nothing less than a manifesto, campaigning with admirable persuasiveness for the artistic and human virtues that Satie embodies: delicacy, irreverence, lightness; the improvised, the throwaway, the frivolous and the aleatory. Satie was a sly humorist whose jokes usually had an abrasive undercurrent – as when he claimed that ‘Ravel has refused the Légion d’Honneur – but all his music accepts it’; or when he told Debussy, à propos the first movement of La Mer, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, that he particularly liked the bit at a quarter to eleven. (I can’t help feeling that Satie would have adored the best joke ever broadcast on Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, when Humphrey Lyttelton informed listeners that Debussy had completed his revisions of La Mer while staying at a hotel in Eastbourne, and was lucky to have been given a room with a sea view, adding that on his return the following year he was not so fortunate, ‘leading to the composition of his lesser-known tone poem, Le Tesco’s Car Park’.)

Many of Satie’s aperçus are familiar, but Penman is perhaps the first person to make a point of placing his humour in context, and to locate him in a recognisable tradition which includes not only Rabelais, Flann O’Brien and Spike Milligan, but also – more surprisingly – the likes of David Nobbs, Ken Dodd and Les Dawson. (The middle part of the book consists of a kind of Flaubertian dictionary, a ‘Satie A-Z’, and it’s pleasing to note that of the two Leses on offer, Les Dawson has a much longer entry than Les Six.) Satie as a Gallic exemplar of the famous British sense of humour? Why not? His mother was English, and with his bowler hat, velveteen suits and collection of hundreds of umbrellas, he resembles no one so much as John Steed in The Avengers – a show much loved in France, and still running weekly on TV there under the title Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir. Satie himself stressed the Englishness of his humour (which he said was ‘reminiscent of Cromwell’s’) and would remind people that his birthplace, Honfleur in Normandy, marks the point where the Seine flows into the English Channel. In any case, Anglophilia has always been one of the hallmarks of the French avant-garde. It makes sense that among Ravel’s programming choices for the SMI’s cutting-edge 1912 season was Vaughan Williams’s ultra-English song cycle On Wenlock Edge.

For Penman, however, Satie is more than a joker. He is the supreme practitioner of a species of art forever undervalued by solemn-minded dullards, and which is anything but trivial. In the first of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino designated it ‘lightness’ but also coined another suggestive term: ‘weightless gravity’. A work of art that manifests this quality, he wrote, is analogous to ‘the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times – noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring – belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars’.

There are plenty of classical pieces, I suspect, that Penman would like to consign to ‘a cemetery for rusty old cars’. As in his last book, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, he peppers his cultural commentary with snippets of autobiography, and in a diary entry for 4 January 2023 (the third and final section of the book is called ‘Satie diary’) he writes: ‘What put me off classical music when I was young: big puffed-up symphonies and self-important concertos; sweaty drama-queen conductors; the annual flag and bluster of the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms.’ (To which I can only say: hard relate.) He has his own terminology for Calvino’s ‘revving and roaring’. Observing that much of Satie’s music ‘has this distilled feeling of a happy – or at least pleasantly bittersweet – acceptance of passing time’, he adds that ‘too much classical music has the opposite feeling: great granite blocks shouldered against the unfairness of human mortality: an egomaniac’s name writ large, a fist banging hard on the work table.’ His feelings on this subject are not confined to music, though: ‘The superficial playfulness of some practitioners of avant-garde art … barely hides an intransigent, humourless, rhino-sized ego. Too many artists put a premium on difficulty, impenetrability, doom. No such transcendent value is afforded the light, the dizzy, the caressing.’ Elsewhere, in the alphabetised entry on ‘Happiness’, he casts his net even wider:

Why this general tendency to fetishise ‘darkness’? Why is so much reflection about modernity tangled up with melancholy? Why do we overstress the abject, the obscene, the transgressive? … Henry de Montherlant’s ‘Happiness writes in white ink on a white page’ has been used for too long as a kind of unthinking, head-nod punctuation. Not contempt for happiness exactly, but certainly some kind of deep-seated suspicion. I mean, don’t we all want to be happy? Why fight against it?

Satie makes an excellent foot soldier in this battle against solemnity, but he is not the only one co-opted in the course of Penman’s book. There are glances – and often more than that – at the films of Jacques Tati, the music of Bill Evans, the work of Hockney, Queneau, Glenn Gould, Shostakovich, Jean Rhys, Federico Mompou, Carla Bley, René Clair, Mallarmé, Cocteau, Burt Bacharach and a few dozen others. It’s not a bad pantheon, you have to admit. There were few pages where I didn’t find myself nodding along or sometimes even punching the air. The Société musicale indépendante would have welcomed Penman with open arms.