Our dear Mr. Erik Satie was born by the sea in the village of Honfleur, France in 1866. I wonder if it was a rainy day like today. I don’t know as nothing that I have tells me. He once said that he was born very young in a very old world. That is true for many of us just as is also the opposite: born very old in a very young world that may even be reversing itself.

He loved to play music and wanted to learn how to play more and better and so he went to school and learned how. But he didn’t like to follow the rules just like many of us don’t like to either. We do like to make up our own rules though. So that’s what our dear Mr. Satie did but as you can imagine not everyone liked his kind of music. It sounds like chanting and eating while you are writing or singing which you are not supposed to do.

Posted by Chopin, Liszt and Friends

Satie lived in Paris and went to the Black Cat, Le Chat Noir, where he liked to be with friends. There was also a cat named Maigriou who liked to be there with the poets and writers and actors and other strange people who came there just to be with other strange people. Places like that are very wonderful and marvelous to be within and there ought to be many more of them so other strange people could go there and be happy.

Satie wrote and played his famous piano pieces there called the Gymnopedies. One of his pieces is called “Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear” and I like it very much. He liked to give directions in his piano music that went something like this: “From the end of the eyes,” “In the throat,” “On yellowing velvet.” Imagine. This makes it so that his piano works are very fun to play and not like practicing at all.

Satie’s music is very different just like he was. It is sad and happy at the same time just like he was. It is dark and light at the same time so it can be whatever you want it to be when you are playing it. I like that he wrote notes about his life and the things that he saw about him and that when he wrote about his day he put in that he marked out time to think hard and a time to sit and a time for inspiration. He died on the first day in July of cirrhosis of the liver in a hospital as he could not live at home alone anymore. (17 May 1866 – 1 July 1925). He was only 59-years old.

I’m sorry that I have to quit writing about our dear Mr. Satie because I like doing it very much. It is like hanging out at the Le Chat Noir. I wish it were very nearby.