Caroline Potter’s beautifully written and extensively researched book on the life and artistic universe of the inscrutable Erik Satie should be on the reading list of anyone interested in the artistic avant-garde in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rich cast of characters that ran through Satie’s life and work are here invoked, and interdisciplinary collaborative works are, some for the first time, described in vivid detail. This book comes just a few years after the publication of Erik Satie: Music, Art, and Literature, a collection of essays edited by Potter.Footnote ¹ Potter’s new book extends and develops the best features of the Ashgate volume, seriously considering Satie’s role as an artist of many mediums and, fundamentally, as an ‘interart’ collaborator.

Potter’s book is organized into seven chapters with an introductory preface, and includes useful sections on chronology and Personalia (the latter addressing the huge number of people and professions representing Satie’s artistic circle). The preface to the book states one of Potter’s overarching goals: to situate ‘Satie firmly in the Paris of his time’ (p. x). She accomplishes this in a variety of ways, some more novel than others.

First, Potter develops the oft-observed idea that Satie’s repetitive structures are self-consciously mechanical (and reflective of a modernist preoccupation with technology) by looking at actual mechanical instruments of the period. In Chapter 1 (‘Satie in Montmartre: Mechanical Music in the Belle Époque’) Potter pays particular attention to the ubiquitous barrel organ, the orgue de Barbarie, a mechanical street instrument that played pre-programmed music (mostly of a popular flavour) by cranking a lever. The barrel organ was tied inextricably to working-class, sometime itinerant organ grinders, and Potter argues that the ‘association of the instrument with an irregular, marginal lifestyle ensured that “respectable” people were suspicious of the sound’ (p. 13). The barrel organ and the organ grinder thus became anti-bourgeois avatars for poets, visual artists and, as Potter argues, musicians living in and around Montmartre at the end of the nineteenth century. Potter argues that its influence, in addition to that of other street entertainments and mechanical instruments, can be seen throughout Satie’s career.

Chapter 1 includes a detailed analysis of the Satie/Jules Dépaquit collaboration Jack in the Box (c. 1899), whose complete text is now sadly lost. Potter looks at Satie’s sketch ‘L’orgue de barbarie du compère Wegg le fou’, which is characterized by barrel-organ-like wheezy dotted rhythms and an irregular measure of in a section otherwise in duple meter. Potter makes the case that this rhythmic irregularity – typical for Satie, who often used this device to trip up the listener – is evocative of a faulty mechanism. Here, Potter argues, one might locate the human in the machine. Potter cleverly supports this by suggesting that the Wegg in the title of this sketch is perhaps an allusion to Silas Wegg, a character in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, who had a wooden leg (and is thus thought, by some characters, to be only partly human).

Potter continues to evoke the rich artistic atmosphere of early twentieth-century Paris in Chapter 2 (‘Futurism, the New Avant-Garde, and Mechanical Music’), which chronicles Satie’s relationship with members of the cutting-edge avant-garde. From 1905 on, Satie collaborated with and/or was influenced by a range of contemporary artists, including Varèse, Apollinaire, Stravinsky, Picasso, Cocteau, Antheil, Les Six (then known as the Nouveaux Jeunes) and the little-known Louis Carol-Bérard, who wrote the (now lost) Symphonie des forces Méchaniques 15 years prior to Ballet mécanique. His collaborative projects were multimedia in nature, and include Parade (the Cocteau/Picasso/Massine scandale). Perhaps his most interesting, and little discussed, collaboration from this period was with a self-proclaimed Futurist Woman, Valentine de Saint-Point, with whom he worked on the multimedia piece Les Pantins dansent (1913), a collaboration between music, poetry and improvised dance. Potter distinguishes Satie’s aesthetic and political aims from that of the Italian futurists by pointing out Satie’s antimilitarism, and the essential ‘inertia’ (p. 50) of his music, which contrasts with the proto-fascist, brutal aesthetics described by Marinetti and others.

Chapter 3 (‘Satie’s Texted Piano Works’) is one of Potter’s stronger sections. She counters the typical characterization of Satie’s ‘humorous piano works’, with their mysterious titles and accompanying texts, as nonsense. Potter considers Satie’s texts seriously, and sometimes literally. For instance, Potter takes the accompanying text of the first movement of Heures séculaires et instantanées (1914) at face value, which Satie scholars have thus far not demonstrated in print. She convincingly links Satie’s description of a black man in a seemingly surrealist environment to Martinique and the devastating eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902.

In this chapter Potter also gives an excellent sketch-to-publication account of ‘Celle qui parle trop’ (from Chapitres tournés en tous sens), whose accompanying text describes a wife whose incessant chatter eventually kills her husband. Potter’s research reveals that the sketch for this piece includes bar-lines (in ) – in contrast to the bulk of Satie’s texted piano works – yet no expressive indications or dynamics. The sketch also includes a texted preface, suggesting that the scene is set in a department store. Potter persuasively argues that rather than haphazardly insert his enigmatic text after writing the music, Satie took the text seriously into account, and its spirit is often reflected in the music. By focusing on the text, Potter argues that these piano works (by far the largest category in his repertoire) cannot be understood outside of their status as interart works. To do so – as most contemporary recordings of these pieces have – is to eliminate much of their meaning. While not answering the question of whether or not Satie’s texts were intended to be performed aloud, Potter argues that they are essential to the total work.

Chapter 4 (‘Repetition and Furniture Music’) looks at pieces that Potter claims are closer to the ‘mechanical aesthetic’ (p. 138) than any other. Though Satie’s self-described ‘furniture music’ is often discussed for its conceptual audacity, it is rarely taken seriously as music. To redress this, Potter considers, in addition to his other furniture pieces, Satie’s ‘entr’acte’ music for Max Jacob’s unpublished, and thought to be lost, play Ruffian toujours, truand jamais (1920). The play was performed at a concert held in Paul Poiret’s Galerie Barbazanges, alongside an exhibition of children’s artwork. Most scholars focus on Pierre Bertin’s note to the audience, in reference to Satie’s entr’actes: ‘we specifically wish to ask you not to give it any attention’ (p. 162). As many scholars have recounted, the audience famously failed to heed this request.

Potter’s new research on Jacob’s rediscovered play is intriguing: she gives a full account of the plot (which includes two characters who play musical instruments, including a young piano student named Germaine), and reveals that music was used not just in-between acts, but was central to the narrative. Intriguingly, the part of Germaine’s piano teacher is voiced entirely off-stage. Potter tantalizingly suggests that Satie himself may have performed the off-stage part of the piano teacher. Her research also reveals that despite Satie’s desire for the entr’actes to be experienced as background music they tied in quite nicely with the narrative of the play: the entr’actes (first ‘Chez un bistrot’, then ‘Un salon’) set up the location of the act following it. Thus, ‘the music prolongs the action of the play, bringing the stage set to the interval venue, blurring the boundaries between the stage and public space and thus creating a total artistic experience’ (p. 160). The final portion of this chapter interrogates the interesting way that the human and the machine coalesce via Satie’s repetition. She also rightly distinguishes Satie’s radically provocative art from muzak – to which it is often compared – whose commercial purpose is antithetical to Satie’s furniture pieces.

Chapters 5 and 6 (‘Science, Society and Politics in Satie’s Life’ and ‘The Provocative Satie and the Dada Connection’) continue to contextualize Satie’s work within the ethos of his time. Chapter 5 looks both at Satie’s ‘genuine interest in scientific discourses’ (p. 177) and his serious involvement with socialist and communist societies centred in Arcueil, the Parisian suburb where he lived from 1898 until his death. Potter’s discussion of Satie’s political life in Arcueil is particularly useful; she notes that beyond the work of Jane Fulcher, his left-wing politics have been little explored.Footnote ² She links the revolutionary politics of his early cabaret days to his later activity, and clarifies that in Satie’s time, the Parisian suburbs were home to poor, working class communities and were politically a kind of left-wing ‘red belt’ (p. 189). It was in Arcueil that Satie joined the French Socialist party, and eventually the Communist Party (of which he was an early recruit).

His other, perhaps more serious, political involvement was in the service of bettering his home community. With the help of the recently published memoirs of Satie’s Arcueil neighbours and friends Léon-Louis Veyssière and his son André, Potter gives a vividly detailed account of Satie’s civic involvement. Satie taught piano and ear-training to adults and children, brought some of his fashionable Montmartre friends to perform his café-concert repertoire in concert, and co-founded a charitable organization dedicated to enriching the lives of children. These civic engagements continued throughout Satie’s time in Arcueil, and they reveal a seriousness not often associated with the enigmatic composer. And, indeed, he may have felt more comfortable with his neighbours in Arcueil than with his Parisian friends. As Potter notes:

In this chapter, especially, Potter effectively lends humanity to a famously difficult-to-pin-down artist.

Chapter 6 chronicles Satie’s collaboration and contact with, and affinity for, the self-proclaimed Dadaists, who began to congregate in Paris by the early 1920s. In many ways, Satie was naturally aligned with the anarchist spirit of Dada: his leftist politics, his absurdist writings, his desire to provoke and his essentially interdisciplinary approach to art made him a natural ally. Satie’s last two works – Mercure (in collaboration with Picasso, Massine and the Ballets Russes), and the outrageous Relâche (with Picabia, René Clair and the Ballets Suédois), featuring the film Entr’acte – were largely responsible for his posthumous legacy, and his status as a legendary provocateur. Potter’s final chapter (‘Satie’s Death and Musical Legacy’) further considers Satie’s unsettled legacy. In the immediate wake of Satie’s death, Potter shows that the press had to ‘perform a delicate pirouette’ in order to pay ‘homage to the composer they had recently been criticising’ (p. 238). Some accomplished this by addressing only his early piano works, which remain his most popular pieces. Now, thanks to the recuperative work of John Cage and others, Satie is often thought of a proto postmodernist, influencing artists from the experimentalist Howard Skempton to Steve Hackett, guitarist for the English rock group Genesis.

The strengths of Potter’s book begin with Potter’s engaging writing, which is transparent and lively, making her material accessible to the ambitious general reader as well as to specialists. Potter includes both the original French and her own translations for nearly every text she references, aiding readers who have only a passing knowledge of French, and providing for researchers the original texts of many unpublished works. There are some redundancies from chapter to chapter, but this may have been intentional: it is fully possible to read each chapter as a freestanding article, though readers new to Satie would perhaps be best served by reading the roughly chronological account from beginning to end. Potter’s attention to the secondary literature on Satie (giving full credit to the foundational work of Robert Orledge, Ornella Volta and Steven Whiting), demonstrates the care with which she approaches her subject, and helps situate her own original research, which is a significant contribution to the existing literature.Footnote ³ Another strength, alluded to in the chapter descriptions above, is the audacity with which Potter breaks through disciplinary silos to value and seriously analyse Satie’s extra-musical artistic endeavours (primarily his accompanying texts), as well as that of his collaborators. Importantly, she doesn’t seek to ‘solve’ Satie’s aesthetic inscrutability. Potter does suggest, however, that a more informed approach to his interdisciplinary works will aid in our understanding of the artistic and social values of this heady period. This book will be of interest to academics, performers and the ambitious general reader.