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Le Picadilly by Erik Satie (1866-1925)

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Portrait of Erik Satie
© 1999 Archives Erik Satie, Paris

Satie, a French composer, studied music at the Paris Conservatory Schola Cantorum. He was the pupil of Vincent D’Indy and Albert Roussel.

Against the romantic Wagnerian style which was incapable of expressing a French sensibility, Satie developed a controlled, abstract and seemingly simple style. His music, in general, features a removed, unaffected beauty. Although his early works anticipate the harmonic innovations of some impressionists, such as Debussy and Ravel, his later compositions foretell the neoclassicism of the early 20th century. Satie often disguised his artistic intention with comical humor, adding nonsense programs or whimsical titles such asThree Pieces in the Shape of a Pear (1918). The “avant-garde” in Satie’s aesthetics is found not in his often very bland music but in the ways that his compositional simplicity challenged the ultra-seriousness of the musical establishment.

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Marcel Duchamp and Man
Ray in René Clair’s
1924 film Entr’acte

Clair,Satie, and Picabia
during the filming
of Entr’acte, 1924

A widely experimental musician, Satie composed a musical score in 1924 for a twenty-two minute avant-garde film entitled ENTR’ACTE, written and produced by Francis Picabia, directed by René Clair. The cast of the short film included Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Satie himself. It was the first time a “shot-by-shot” musical composition had been written for a film. Satie meticulously examined the film and wrote a composition designed to synchronize exactly with it and to have rhythms match the flow of the editing of the film. It is certain that none of the artists involved in the film were interested in providing the audience something that was expected. (They used an element of pleasant rather than unpleasant surprise.) The music of Satie was recorded by Henri Sauguet and added to the silent print in 1967.

The music playing here is cited from SATIE/3Gymnopédies & Other Piano Works, 1984, no. 17 – Le Picadilly. Beginning in 1888, Satie was a pianist in a number of Montmartre cafés (which were the meeting places of musicians as well as of writers and painters.) Around 1900, he produced several first-rate café songs. Le Picadilly is one of the music-hall pieces composed during this period. Satie’s contribution to the world of popular entertainment was substantial.

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Erik Satie by Francis Picabia

It is hard for us now to imagine how astonished the Paris audience must have been with Satie’s music which was so different from the lush compositions of his peers, Franck and Saint-Saens. Satie’s audience must have been especially astonished when the music they heard was accompanied by the composer’s bizarre titles and performance instructions. Yet Satie’s compositions are still unlike anything else in the piano literature and still full of touching and evocative delight and charm.

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Erik Satie: Le Picadilly

Erratum Musical, 1913

One can look at seeing; one can not hear hearing.
-Marcel Duchamp, Green Box, 1934

“One way to study music: study Duchamp.” An impressive line John Cage once mentioned. The friendship between these two creative minds reveals their mutual concern with the conventional perception both on the artistic creation and the spectator’s expectation. To Cage, for instance, silence was a compositional tool, a vivid explanation of what can be music. For Duchamp, however, making music meant going beyond the technical exploration of musical composition. Duchamp explored whether one is able to visualize sound and combine it with language by playing music in a random kind of order, in other words, to create something artistic by chance.

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A scene of Duchamp,
Teeny, and Cage playing
chess in a performance,
Sightssoundsystems, a
festival of art and
technology in Toronto,1968

Duchamp’s first musical work, Erratum Musical, is a score for three voices derived from the chance procedure. During a New Year’s visit in Rouen in 1913, he composed this vocal piece with his two sisters, Yvonne and Magdeleine, both musicians. They randomly picked up twenty-five notes from a hat ranging from F below middle C up to high F. The notes then were recorded in the score according to the sequence of the drawing. The three vocal parts of Erratum Musical are marked in sequence as “Yvonne,” “Magdeleine” and “Marcel.” (Duchamp replaced the highest notes with the lower ones in order to make the piece singable for a male voice.) The words that accompanied the music were from a dictionary’s definition of “imprimer” – Faire une empreinte; marquer des traits; une figure sur une surface; imprimer un scau sur cire (To make an imprint; mark with lines; a figure on a surface; impress a seal in wax).

The title “Erratum Musical” can be translated as “musical misprint.” Thus, the book or “text” and the title conjure a dialectic relation between seeing and hearing. Picked from a dictionary, the “text” itself is already a readymade. Through a random order, the meaning of the text/readymade is reproduced and transformed by the repetition of the text.

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Erratum Musical, From
the Green Box, 193

The final representation of this musical “visualizes” the process of hearing a scene of imaginative landscape, as if one is able to see the music through its vocal expression, through its performance or individual interpretation. In other words, the aesthetic experience of listening to a piece of music is transformed into an abstract experience of experiencing an abstract space. One seems to be able to sense the existence of a space in terms of the flow of the layering of the rhythms/voices. Furthermore — and what is very intriguing — this sense of space visualized by the sound/music seems analogous to an abstract experience of a sculptural space. In this case, Duchamp let chance be the creator and make the final decision.

Erratum Musical was first performed publicly by the Dada artist Marguerite Buffet at theManifestation of Dada on March 27, 1920. This earliest performance resulted with restless rustling, shouts and whistles from the audience. The version playing here was from the CD entitled “Marcel Duchamp / The Creative Act,” 1994, No. 6 Erratum Musical (1:38), with Jean-Luc Plouvier as Marcel, Marianne Pousseur as Yvonne and Lucy Grauman as Magdeleine. They perform the three voices simultaneously in different tones. Through the combination of high/low, near/far of the singing, Erratum Musical is visualized/sculpturalized as though one can sense a space contained in its experimental musical landscape. Although Erratum Musical was created in the early 20th century, it is still fully functional to challenge the conventional experience and the musical connoisseurship of today’s general audience.

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Marcel, Yvonne and Magdeleine Duchamp: Erratum Musical

The 1913 “Armory Show” comes ALIVE!

click each image to see animation

Animation 1.
Junghee Choi and
Rhonda R Shearer
Animation 2.
Junghee Choi and
Rhonda R Shearer
Animation 3.
Junghee Choi and
Rhonda R Shearer

Animation 4.
Alvarez Greg and
Rhonda R Shearer
Animation 5.
Junghee Choi and
Rhonda R Shearer

“CUBIST ART IS HERE AS CLEAR AS MUD,” the Chicago Herald-Tribune blasted in 1913. Chicagoans did not understand the new, European modernist art any more than New Yorkers did when the famous Armory Show arrived that same year. It is easy to forget that futurist, cubist and post-impressionist art once provoked a reaction similar to the recent Brooklyn “Sensation Exhibition” sensation. Rudy Giuliani is only a mayor creating a fuss after all. When the Armory Show hit the Big Apple, former President Teddy Roosevelt weighed in by writing that Duchamp’s Nude Descending looked to him like a Navajo Indian rug. See Choi and Shearer’s Animation #4 which attempts to visualize for the Tout-Fait reader this “bully for you” former president’s intrepretation of Duchamp’s work. Choi and Shearer hope that the three newspaper cartoons when transformed into animations will give spectators (Duchamp’s word) a more enlivened sense of the public’s reaction and commentary than what is normally rendered by static, historical images.

For example, in Animation 1,2 and 3, spectators will find, respectively, the moving confusion of a crowded subway escalator filled with rude New Yorkers; the prototype of bad boy cubists (which is a quilt making Grandma); and a frustrated New York gent literally flipping his “lid” and standing on his head but still not “getting” it. Finally, Alverez and Shearer’s development of Animation 5 — using the classic Armory still photo showing old cars and horse carriages waiting for patrons to return from seeing the scandal — takes advantage of the latest in animation technology and after-effects to emphasize what we most forget when we now look at modernist works: it was a much different “high button shoe/top hat world” in 1913 when Duchamp`s works first came to town…”Hey watch the horse shit.”