A musical composer who dabbled in the Dada movement,
a Bohemian gymnopediste of fin-de-siecle Montmartre, and
a legendary dresser known as The Velvet Gentleman for
his sartorial choices, Erik Satie was nearly
unprecedented in technique, style and philosophy among
European composers in the early twentieth century. Yet
his legacy has largely languished in the shadows of
Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel. Mary E. Davis now brings
Satie to life in this fascinating new biography that
demonstrates that his musical innovations reached as far
as his influence. Satie redefined the boundaries of the
composer's art, devising new methods of artistic
expression that melded ordinary elements and rarefied
genres of words, visual art and music. Davis argues that
Satie's modernist aesthetic was grounded in the
contradictions apparent in his life such as enrolling in
the conservative Schola Cantorum after working as a
cabaret performer and is reflected in his irreverent
essays, drawings and music.''Erik Satie'' explores how
the composer was embraced by both the avant-garde and
Parisian elite, an experience that immersed him in the
worlds of high fashion and cutting-edge modernist art,
and subsequently gave him the aesthetic impetus to
create the new musical style of Neoclassicism. Satie
also crucially employed the power of the image through
his infamous fashion statements, Davis contends, to
establish his place in the art world, and in this
connection between couture and culture, Satie was at the
heart of a nascent celebrity culture. A fascinating and
informative portrait, with numerous illustrations that
include art by Satie himself, ''Erik Satie'' reassesses
the accepted history of modernist music and restores the
composer to his rightful pioneering status. |
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