Meet The Composers: Satie

The first of a series, originally published on Litro on 20/11/13

I should confess straightaway that I am no expert on classical music. This journey into classical music is one that I hope to take with the reader, barely a step ahead most of the time, and possibly even a few steps behind sometimes.

© Ian Shine

So why am I taking this journey? Because, as I’ve found myself developing more of an interest in classical music, I’ve also found myself in a vain search for a guide. The only ones I’ve found either swan off miles ahead of me, making absurd presumptions that my knowledge-base has foundations as solid as theirs, or hammer me into a coma with a steady thwock-thwock-thwock of terms that mean close to nothing to the uninitiated. Take this from the Naxos website’s introduction to the Renaissance Period:

“This was also something of a golden period for choral composition as a seemingly endless flow of a capella (unaccompanied) masses, motets, anthems, psalms and madrigals flowed from the pens of the masters of the age.”

Meaningless, I’m sure you’ll agree.

So, what do I propose? Well, I propose looking at one composer at a time, writing about them in an accessible way, trying to provide a window into their life and some of their works. I propose finding some people to come along on this journey with me — so if other people want to contribute to this column, I would be more than happy for them to do so. Just leave a comment below or get in touch through my profile.

Erik Satie (1866-1925)

The first piece of classical music I ever heard and wanted to hear again was Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No.1. I think part of its appeal was how “unclassical” it sounded. As a child, traipsing into primary school assembly every morning, I thought classical music was deafening menagerie of strings and clashing cymbals all fighting for precedence over one another, the kind of thing to start a war to. It was what adults listened to because adults were, well, the kind of people who liked to start wars… with children. For my headmistress, Gustav Holst’s The Planets were the lighter fluid for the fires in the pit of her stomach, ensuring every chastening she doled out would be a chastening to be remembered.

Gymnopédie No.1, on the other hand, is an almost careless dropping of notes from the stave to the piano, one by one; a sort of anti-bombastic statement. Satie wrote it in 1888, towards the end of what is known as the Romantic Period of classical music. This ran from roughly 1825 to 1900 and is characterised by the emergence of artists who took themselves pretty seriously, viewing themselves as visionaries, geniuses, people designed for another strata of life — as was fitting with the social stratification that came about on the back of the industrial revolution.

Take for one Richard Wagner (1813-1883), the much maligned anti-semite, whose operatic marathon the Ring Cycle runs for about 17 hours. Not only was the Ring Cycle a kind of world in itself, but Wagner wanted a special opera house designed for its premiere – and he got one: the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

Then take Satie, whose Gymnopédie No. 1 — there are three in all — counts as one of his longer piano pieces, at three minutes. He came along and tried to stick a pin into the inflated earnestness of the Romantic Period, and not only by stripping down music to its bare essentials, but by coming up with titles such as Pieces to Make You Run Away and Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear — which he concocted after being accused of writing music that had no form — and musical directions such as “like a nightingale with toothache” and “don’t be proud”.

Indeed, he called for "music without sauerkraut”, and an escape from "Teutonic seriousness", and he didn’t just do this with fragile little piano pieces (most famously the Gnossiennes, as well as the Gymnopédies). In 1917, he collaborated with Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Serge Diaghilev on the ballet Parade, composing a 15-minute clatter that veers from the apparently quotidian into shattering bouts of foghorns and typewriters and through loop-the-loops of ragtime riffs. There was a riot on the opening night — possibly because of Satie’s music, possibly because of Picasso’s cubist set and costumes — and Satie gained recognition, or rather notoriety, far beyond that which he garnered for his Gymnopédies. Parade is also credited with opening the door that would result in all sorts of industrial music entering our collective ears.

Yet it is his piano works that have probably had a greater influence. Satie’s Vexations — a short musical phrase that could, in theory, be repeated indefinitely — is an obvious precursor to all sorts of loop-based music, particularly Brian Eno’s Ambient series, such as Music for Airports, and Aphex Twin’s Ambient Works. The Gymnopédies can even be heard in more up-tempo electronic music, such as Grimes.       

Satie also had an influence on art, hanging around with Surrealists and Dadaists. Man Ray came up with the idea for his famous “Cadeau” (“Gift”) — a flatiron with a line of nails glued to the bottom, robbing both items of their sole purpose — after going drinking with Satie, and Satie helped him buy the materials in a hardware store after Man Ray’s French proved inadequate.

Muppets creator Jim Henson once said, “The most sophisticated people I know – inside they are all children,” and Satie certainly had a lot of the child’s spirit, energy and unselfconsciousness inside him. And the more I find out about classical composers, the more I discover that many of them were childish, obsessive, bizarre, and probably not the kind of people you’d want to spend time with. Indeed, Satie fan Alistair McGowan found out as much while working on a Radio 4 documentary about the composer, when two leading Satie scholars told him they wouldn't have wanted to meet the man because he was “too quixotic and unpredictable a character” and they'd have found him too difficult to talk to.

Stories about Satie include:

• He had seven identical yellow corduroy suits, one for each day of the week, so he never had to waste time choosing what to wear.
• When it rained, he kept his umbrella under his coat to keep it dry.
• For a time, he ate only white foods, hoping their simplicity and purity would inform his music.
• He carried a hammer around in case anyone attacked him.

And I suppose this is part of why I have found myself attracted to classical music and musicians; because it and they can be anarchic, daft and childish. Because even among normally serious adults, it can create a spirit of rebellion. Back in my primary school, with my Holst-loving headmistress, I was given for a term the daunting duty of pressing play on the stereo as everyone filed in for assembly, and of changing the name on the board displaying the composer of the week. One teacher, let’s call her Mrs T — who later usurped the headmistress at the summit of that provincial primary school pyramid — took the opportunity offered by 1 April to expose her rival’s foolishness and faux knowledge in front of the whole school. Mrs T gave me a piece of card bearing the name of that week’s star composer, a name I had never seen before, one that was some sort of concatenation of two Formula 1 drivers — Prostalesi, I think. “Just put any old music on,” Mrs T said. “She’ll never know.”

And she didn’t know: not while she announced the composer of the week, not while she read out a paragraph about Prostalesi provided to her by Mrs T, not while she told us how much she loved his music and nodded her head as she made us all listen. But she did know when Mrs T revealed her ruse at the end of assembly and hundreds of children, and several teachers, started laughing. It wasn’t 1917, and it wasn’t quite a riot, but I think it was something of which Satie would have approved.

The Art of the Double Bill

Originally published on Litro on 19/03/13

What is it about choosing cinema snacks? Deciding which combo of overpriced junk food to go for takes up as much time as picking the film you’re going to see. You have to have popcorn, of course, but will it be sweet or salted? Or what about nachos and a dip. But then will the dip be cheese, salsa or guacamole? How about an ice cream instead? Although it will be tricky to pick from all those flavours. Or some pic’n’mix ? Or a bag of chocolates? Perhaps a hot dog? And then what about something to drink? Maybe you like to swill the popcorn out of your teeth with that auditorium classic, watery coke, or kill the spice of your nachos with a beer, or augment the traces of the cigarette you puffed outside by having a coffee (see Jim Jarmusch). The choices go on, and the combinations will all work together in different ways.

The same could be said of putting together a double bill — an innovation that came about during the depression of the 1930s as of way of roping in a larger audience who would be more likely to part with their hard-earned if they were getting two films for the price of one. The art of the perfect double bill has always been about finding two films that bring out something in the other that might not be quite so piquant if they were shown on their lonesome, or alongside something else. It’s like choosing to put gin together with tonic or Angostura bitters, or to eat a hot dog with ketchup or mustard — a view shared by New Statesman film critic Ryan Gilbey:

“The only rule I can see for a double bill is finding two films with complementary flavours,” he says. “I guess there doesn’t even have to be a literal connection like the same director, star or even genre. One good example that I remember — actually it’s a triple bill, but one of the films is short — was at London’s old Scala cinema in the late 1980s, where I got most of my cinematic education. It was playing the first run of Alex Cox’s bizarre warmed-up spaghetti western Straight to Hell, which they showed with Bob Rafelson’s Monkees film, Head, and Luis Buñuel’s 40-minute religious comedy Simon of the Desert. It was genius, because each film opened up the other for the viewer.”

Ice cream, all the flavours (too much of a good thing)
It is exactly this sort of hotchpotch of filmic fare that appeals to online cinema Mubi.com’s content manager Duncan Gray, who says the only real rule for a double bill is that it be “an instructive but fun way to compare and contrast, to acknowledge the breadth of cinema and the joy of omnivorous consumption by bouncing two films off one another”.

By the same measure, a lot of the obvious connections for double bills — sequels; remakes; same leading actors — may leave one feeling rather surfeited; as if one’s eyes were bigger than one’s belly. Gray again: “One Saturday night in college, I joined a group of friends to watch all three Indiana Jones movies back-to-back-to-back. Though I’d already seen each film many times (and loved them all), placing them side by side gave me the belated realisation that Indiana Jones goes through the same damn character arc each time. In other words, taking them all at once diminished the impact of each individual film instead of growing them.”

Gilbey cites the pairing of Alan Parker’s Midnight Express and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver — two films about young, American, criminal outsiders that were commonly screened together in the 1970s and 1980s — as another example of double bill overkill. “It sounds like eating potatoes and rice to me: way too heavy. Likewise William Friedkin’s Cruising and Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill — how much sex and violence do you really want in one sitting?”

While a director double bill may be a more rewarding way to exploit obvious connections — “ask any card-carrying auteurist, and they’ll tell you that the best way to experience a great director is to look at their films as an entire body of work”, Gray says — it does seem to lack imagination, especially when there is a pretty much endless platter of movies to be picked at.

Sweet popcorn & Seven-Up (two takes on sugar-coated)
One of the best double bills I remember going to see — at London’s home of double bills, the Prince Charles Cinema on Leicester Square — is Chris Columbus’ Home Alone withFrank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life a couple of Christmases ago. The films look at a lot of the same themes (festivity; home; family; being trapped in a little town) but consider them through different eyes — the eyes of a little boy in 1990 and a middle-aged man in 1946 — although one gets the feeling that these eyes have elements of the same soul behind them: James Stewart’s character in It’s a Wonderful Life  George Bailey, even declares at one point “I wanna do what I wanna do” — a dream that Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister gets to fulfil — as if they are the same spirit in different bodies (see the newly released Cloud Atlas).

Gilbey suggests teaming up It’s a Wonderful Life with Joel and Ethan Coen’s Raising Arizona — “the sweetness and tradition of the Capra satisfied one part of you, and the breakneck mania of the Coens another” — and Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Daywith Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel — “very different treatments of the subject of stasis from different traditions, Hollywood and arthouse, but there is enough crossover to make the pairing spark”.

Galaxy Counters & salted popcorn (anarchy and incongruity)
Gray adds something new to the recipe, saying a favourite double bill of his is the classic Looney Tunes short Duck Amuck (which is easily worth six-and-a-half minutes of anybody’s time) and Leos Carax’s Holy Motors. “They not only share similar themes in genres as disparate as children’s cartoons and arthouse films, Duck Amuck provides the ideal gateway and context for the Carax film, as its anarchy makes no more or less sense than that of Holy Motors, so you get to loosen your expectations and see what happens to anarchy when it grows up.”

Gilbey’s fondness for watching films while munching on “Galaxy Counters sprinkled into a tub of salted popcorn, shaken well,” may well be the cinema snack equivalent of that anarchy grown up, with “the combination of salt and chocolate, hard counters and spongy popcorn, offering the same odd combo of incongruous flavours as an unusual double bill”.

Nachos & coke (a spot of heat with a splash of sugar)
For me, the cinema diet of choice has to be nachos — something a little bit sharp, that will stick in your teeth (and your throat) — washed down with diet coke — something a bit easier to take. Cinematically, this could translate into Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine followed by Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. They have a lot in common — both French, black and white films, about criminals and outsiders, and are both about 90 minutes long — but come at similar material 40 years apart. And while Pickpocket is not a simple watch, Bresson’s style gives it almost a fairytale touch that makes it a much easier watch than La Haine, at least aesthetically, allowing it to wash away the nasty taste Kassovitz’s film might leave behind.

So what are your perfect cinema pairings — from the box office and the refreshments stand?

How a novel should be?

Review: How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

This book is definitely not going to be to everyone's taste, but then Sheila Heti would be the first person to acknowledge that. For, as Heti says on page one, "you can admire anyone for being themselves", and that is really what this book is about; although more importantly it is the way that this book is concerned with this topic that makes it so monumental and has resulted in it receiving so much praise (although apparently not on Amazon).

"How Should a Person Be?" is not concerned with living up to traditional expectations of what a novel should be, it is concerned only with saying what it wants to say, and saying it in the best way the author can find to say it. It is a memoir-cum-novel-cum play about a female writer (also called Sheila) trying to write a play and failing, trying to hold together a friendship and partially failing, and trying to understand how a person should be, and finally understanding it (sort of) through her failings. By stripping away many of the pretences of traditional fiction, Heti finds a way of drawing the reader into her world, taking the reader along with her, through her failings and her despair and her sufferings and out the other side. And it is this highly personal, self-flagellating method of story-telling that helps to get across the book's message: "A life without failure, suffering or doubt [is] empty of those things that make a human life meaningful." A person should be someone who is happy to fail, who is prepared to keep on failing, to face up to their failings (as Heti is doing with this book, which is not the play she set out to write), and to learn from their failings; rather than someone who keeps running away from their failings in the hope of finding a place where they never fail, suffer or doubt themselves, because that place doesn’t exist.

The book is about more than this, although this is its key message. But as I said above, a lot of what the book is about is connected to the way the book is constructed, in fragmentary chunks, in acts like a play (Sheila's failure to write a play is her success; because she has a five act book here, so isn't that a play, even if it isn't the kind of play she set out to write, or the kind of thing normally called 'a play'?), with events and its protagonist sprawling itinerantly across North America in the same way as Sheila's mind sprawls itinerantly across the plains of life.

A traditional novel shows us a rounded image of a "traditional" person (a 19th century image of a person, living a sort of "monotrack" life), embedded in one place, living an apparently linear life. Heti understands that real people and real life are not like that anymore. With the internet, with the ease of moving around from place to place, with our atomised society, few of us really live lives that fan out into a kind of linear narrative. Rather we live, as David Shields puts it in his book "How Literature Saved My Life", a sort of collage life, taking all these myriad things that happen to us and trying to fit them together in the best way that we can.

If "How Should a Person Be?" doesn't sound like the kind of book for you, that's ok. And if it sounds like the kind of thing you might hate, that is perhaps even better. For as Heti says towards the end of this book: "The only way to go somewhere new is to do the thing I most fear." So go on, give this book a try. It might scare you, and you might despise it, but it is guaranteed to take you somewhere new.

The picture for this review, which may appear to make little sense, is a reference to the final chapter of the book