Sarabandes (Satie)
French composer and critic Alexis Roland-Manuel wrote in 1916 that the Sarabandes represented "a milestone in the evolution of our music...pieces of an unprecedented harmonic technique, born of an entirely new aesthetic, which create a unique atmosphere, a sonorous magic of complete originality.
[4][5] Satie was duly assigned as a reservist to the 33rd Infantry Regiment at the Citadel in Arras,[6] nicknamed La belle inutile ("The Useless Beauty") for its fine architecture and lack of strategic importance.
Satie's modern reinterpretations consist of three dances with a total duration of roughly 15 minutes: Biographer Mary E. Davis wrote that "the Sarabandes introduce compositional approaches that would prove important not only in Satie's later work but also in the broader history of French music...they presented a new conception of large-scale form, in which groups of three very similar pieces, deliberately interlinked by means of motivic cells, harmonic events and recurring interval patterns, combine to constitute a unified work.
"[17] Satie called this tripartite structure he invented "an absolutely original form" that was "good in itself,"[18] a means of exploring a central musical idea from three different perspectives without resorting to traditional variation techniques.
[19] The possible influence of Chabrier on Satie's advanced harmonic language of the 1880s has long been noted, by Maurice Ravel in the 1920s[20] and biographer Rollo H. Myers (1948)[21] up to the present, focusing on the similarities of the unresolved ninths in the Sarabandes and those found in the Prelude of Le roi malgré lui.
[22] Yet there are signs Satie was already feeling his way towards a harmonic "no-man's land" in the unconventional ninths and even thirteenths that appear in his 3 mélodies (to poems by Latour) of 1886,[23][24] and his tonal approach in the Sarabandes is radically different.
1 was originally prefaced by a stanza from Latour's poem La Perdition (The Damnation): These apocalyptic verses bear no obvious relation to the music, though they do reflect Satie's growing religious preoccupations, perhaps with a dash of humor.
[29] Satie's inquiring mind kept him well-versed in the history of the established musical forms he tackled, leading pianist-musicologist Olof Höjer to wonder if this knowledge accounted for both the otherwise arcane Latour quote and the "unmistakeable hint of decadent sensuality" he found in the Sarabandes.
[34][35][36] In an article on his brother's music for the June 1895 issue of the esoteric religious journal Le coeur, Conrad Satie referred to the unpublished Sarabandes as the "works of a mystic pagan, and which give a foretaste of the Catholic who was to write the Danses gothiques.
For the first concert of the SMI's second season, on January 16, 1911, Ravel personally played Satie's second Sarabande, a prelude from Le Fils des étoiles (1892), and the third Gymnopédie at the Salle Gaveau in Paris.
The unsigned program note praised Satie as "a precursor of genius...With today's performance of the Second Sarabande (which bears the astonishing date of 1887), Maurice Ravel will prove the esteem in which the most 'advanced' composers hold this creator who, a quarter century ago, was already speaking the audacious musical idiom of tomorrow.
One of his aims in bringing to light obscure contemporary composers like Satie was to challenge the reputation of his chief rival, Debussy, as the wellspring of all modern trends in French music.
Journalist and minor composer Jean Poueigh, writing under his pseudonym Octave Seré, briefly mentioned Satie in his 1911 book Musiciens français d'aujourd'hui (French Musicians Today) as "a clumsy but subtle technician" whose Sarabandes had deeply impressed the young Debussy; he condescendingly added that "not too much importance should be attached to it.
