Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (review)

Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall. By Steven Moore Whiting. (Oxford Monographs on Music.) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [596 p. ISBN 0-19-816458-0. $105.]

The central theme of Steven Moore Whiting's Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall is the impact of popular culture on Satie's creative output. At first glance, this new book might be considered superfluous, since it enters an already crowded field. (The work of Ornella Volta and Nancy Perloff immediately springs to mind.) But Whiting builds on the work of his predecessors, and he brings to his study a more thorough knowledge of Satie's activities as a popular musician by making effective use of a whole army of primary documents, including entertainers' memoirs, letters, periodicals issued by the Chat Noir and other establishments, and autograph manuscripts. In addition, Whiting illumines more parallels between the cabaret and other popular idioms on the one hand, and Satie's music on the other, than any previous writer. For scholars of Satie or of French culture around the fin de siècle, this book is a must.

Satie the Bohemian begins with a brief overview of the three types of popular entertainment that most influenced Satie--the café-concert, music hall, and cabaret. Two much larger sections follow: the first is an account of Satie's involvement in these popular milieus between the late 1880s and 1911, the year Maurice Ravel made him famous by heralding the bohemian composer as a "precursor"; the second, the book's final section, covers the later stages of Satie's career, the period between 1911 and 1925, and focuses on the ways he transferred what he heard and saw in the cabarets to works for the concert hall.

The parallels Whiting finds are revealing, for what may seem idiosyncratic or peculiar in Satie can often be traced to cabaret entertainment. For example, Whiting sees an analogy between the three pieces that make up Satie's Gymnopédies and Henri Rivière's shadow plays at the Chat Noir. In the Satie work, the pieces are subtle variations of each other; in Rivière's plays, perspective is achieved through finely graded tones of gray or a single color, leading Whiting to conclude that both men "strove for variety of nuance with a single color or 'dominant mood'" (p. 73). A different kind of parallel exists between "d'Holothurie," the first piece of Embryons desséchés (1913), and Loïsa Puget's nineteenth-century parlor song, "Mon rocher de Saint Malo." Previous scholars have noted that the melodies of both compositions have a single phrase in common, but Whiting argues that the parallel is much more extensive--in fact, that Satie appropriated Puget's entire melody. As evidence, Whiting provides an example that lays out three versions of the melody: Puget's original tune, an early sketch of "d'Holothurie," and Satie's final version. Phrase by phrase, readers can see for themselves how Satie progressively distorted his model by simply altering pitches. In effect, he depended on popular music not only for material but also for technique, since distorting familiar tunes was a procedure practiced by cabaret chansonniers.

The use of "parodistic quotation" is, to be sure, one of the more striking parallels between popular entertainment and Satie's compositions, particularly the humoristic piano works he wrote from 1912 to 1914. In these works, Whiting explains, Satie not only borrowed from a wide range of sources but also explored different types of quotation techniques. In some pieces, he quoted from a single tune, like the trivial parlor song in "d'Holothurie." More frequently, he relied on two or more incongruous sources, clashing them together for comic effect; a clear example of this is the yodel song and Mozart's "Rondo alla turca" in "Tyrolienne turque." He created another composite parody in a piece about crustaceans hunting for some prey: this is "de Podophthalma...