Le Piccadilly (1904)

Poudre d’or (1901)

Jack in the Box (1899)

Gnossiennes Nos. 1 and 5 (1889-90)

Sonatine bureaucratique (1917)

Gymnopedie No 1 (1888)

The Dreamy Fish (1901)

Satie and Debussy – who were good friends, on and off – learned much from each other in their early days. No one, however, would mistake the music of one for that of the other. Although they both enjoyed writing in the popular idiom, for Debussy it was an occasional indulgence while for Satie it was a way of life. Debussy did not have Satie’s dry, sometimes acerbic sense of humour and Satie did not have Debussy’s impressionistic sensitivity. Debussy valued the respectability he acquired over the years, while Satie remained determinedly bohemian. Debussy was demonstrably sane; Satie was not.

The two composers first met in Le chat noir, an arty Parisian cabaret where Satie was resident pianist. His experience in that kind of environment was invaluable when it came to writing pieces like the Piccadilly, a ragtime march written just before Debussy’s Golliwog’s Cakewalk, and another cabaret piece, the waltz Poudre d’or. That Satie loved popular dance is clear from his three-movement music-hall-style “clownerie,” Jack in the Box. But he also developed his own dance forms, like the modally inflected Gnossiennes inspired by Romanian folk musicians at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 or the Gymnopédies danced, he claimed, “by children and naked men” in ancient Sparta. Debussy liked the Gymnopédies so much that he orchestrated two of them.

A relatively serious work in spite of its apparently satirical title, Sonatine bureaucratique treats Clementi’s Sonatina in C in much the same way as Stravinsky was to treat Pergolesi’s music in Pulcinella three years later. That makes it one of the first works in the neo-classical manner which was to enthrall so many composers during the next 20 or 30 years. As for Satie’s Dreamy Fish, it is a fascinating effort to reconcile his music-hall style with the advanced harmonies of Debussy. It was also his aim here to work his music into a coherently continuous structure with recurring themes rather than an assembly of fragments. It took much hard work and many revisions to make the work as convincing as it is.