Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and His World by Caroline Potter (review)

Erik Satie's relationship with the world, especially with the arts, was decidedly idiosyncratic. His strange clothing choices, odd performance directions, and repetitive compositions are well known and heavily described in the literature (for example, Mary E. Davis, Erik Satie, Critical Lives [London: Reaktion Books, 2007] and Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer, Music in the Twentieth Century [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990]). Caroline Potter's newest book on Satie celebrates these idiosyncrasies without fetishizing them. Instead, she emphasizes the need to contextualize Satie as an "interart" creator at the forefront of French modernism. Potter's book, already favorably reviewed elsewhere, won "Classical Music Book of the Year" for 2016 from the Sunday Times.

Potter's concise volume continues work begun in her edited collection on the composer (Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature, Music and Literature [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013]), which explored Satie's interdisciplinary writing, performance art, and composition. Her latest monograph presents several fresh insights and weaves together extant literature with archival discoveries and sketch studies. At times, the author is so humble about her achievements that a reader might be unimpressed, not realizing that Potter makes important new contributions to the field partly by exploring several lesser-known works. As a supplement to the book, Potter arranged for students at London's Royal College of Music to record five of Satie's previously unrecorded pieces—all examples of his musique d'ameublement (furniture music)—and posted them to a YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGfOdIdyBcPCtFlg0UXF0Lw [accessed 12 February 2018]). Unfortunately, on its Web page for the book, the publisher fails to provide a link to the channel and mentions its location only at the end of the preface and in the acknowledgements. These recordings are an incredibly important service to the field, and they help illustrate several of Potter's most persuasive arguments. The channel ought to be more prominently advertised and easier to access.

Rather like Satie's music, Potter's book is short and deceptively simple, circling around a theme that, with closer examination, is quite astute. Her overarching goal is to reorient Satie scholarship toward a better understanding of his music within its intended, multimedia context. In this way, Potter's book is especially timely, participating in the recent trend of rethinking early twentieth-century composers—such as Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel—within their historical and social contexts (see Peter Kaminsky, ed., Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music, Eastman Studies in Music [Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011] and the conference "Rethinking Stravinsky: Sounds and Gestures of Modernism" that took place in Fisciano-Salerno, Italy, in 2012).

Potter's writing is accessible and engaging. She does not assume the reader has a deep knowledge of Satie, modernism, or the French language, and to this end usually provides extensive translations. Sometimes Satie used a mixture of French and English, however, and Potter does not always choose to translate the French words in those quotations. This may prove frustrating for the nonexpert reader, an audience that Potter seems partially interested in reaching. At the same time, the extensive footnotes and high level of analytical writing makes this an excellent resource for scholars who wish to have a better sense of Satie's cultural milieu, influences, and reception.

The book proceeds mostly chronologically, but each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of Satie's output. In the first chapter, Potter reevaluates the importance of Satie's early career in Parisian cafés and cabarets, especially the Chat Noir in Montmartre, suggesting that the composer's interest in nearly mechanical repetition may have grown out of a familiarity with a particularly "low" form of music making: the barrel organ. This idea is well supported by Potter's archival research and will certainly inform future Satie scholarship. Potter is by no means the...