No 5: Satie - Les Pantins Dansent Later he dropped all that, adopting the pinstripe suit and bowler hat of an English civil servant. He carried an umbrella to ward off the sun, and constantly rubbed himself with pumice stone as he had a horror of soap. Satie was always desperately poor ("poor by conviction," as Stravinsky put it), eking out a living by writing popular songs and playing the piano in cabarets like the Chat Noir. It's a misfortune to be typecast as an eccentric, because it means no one takes you seriously. Satie's friend Debussy called him "a gentle medieval musician lost in this century," which under a veneer of affection is really a put-down. Around the time of the First World War, tastes changed, and a younger generation appeared who took him very seriously indeed. The poet Jean Cocteau, that great impresario of the avant-garde, installed Satie as the prophet and father-figure of his new populist aesthetic. Cocteau elevated sport, music hall, the circus and cabaret songs over Germanic seriousness, things which Satie's music had celebrated for years. Satie's cheerful vamping cabaret-song patterns and his general air of Parisian sauciness and Dada silliness may have dated. But underneath the period quaintness lies something important and enduring. Though his technique was deficient, his instinct was not. More than the sophisticates who ruled Parisian musical life in the 1890s like Chausson and Saint-Saens, this shy, crusty naïf felt the approach of the modern age. He caught its mood in pieces which turn their back on technical sheen, grand dimensions and high-flown sentiments. When it's not joking or sticking its tongue out, his music takes on a mute, blank pathos, of the sort puppets have. This piece, which is actually called "The Puppets Dance," catches it perfectly. It was written in 1913 to accompany a poem and newly choreographed dance at a so-called Metachoric Festival. The poem is cringingly awful, and the dance has vanished into oblivion. The piece lives on without them, thanks to its air of stealthy mystery and awkward tenderness. 00.00 The bassoon announces an odd little tune, followed by another on the clarinet at 00.08. After that it's just "one thing after another": little to-and-fro movements between two chords, a chord blankly moving up and down, ticking repeated notes, and here and there a sad little phrase. What all these ideas have in common is that they all last exactly four bars (the plodding beat makes counting these bars very easy: ONE-two, TWO-two, THREE-two, FOUR-two 1.33 signs of order appear: the phrase stammered out here is repeated at 1.40, and the wide-eyed clarinet tune at 1.48 is repeated on the oboe at 1.56. 2.03 Finally the opening bassoon and clarinet tunes come back, but in reverse order, and at the very end this little musical machine appears to wind down and stop. Trois Morceaux en forme de Poire: "En Plus" Another of Debussy's put-down remarks to Satie was that he had no idea about musical form. Satie responded in a typical mocking way, by writing Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear, for two pianos. There are actually seven pieces, not three, and they're a compendium of Satie's various styles: cabaret jollity, mock-academic correctness, incidental music for plays, even music written for Rosicrucian ceremonies. This movement, beautifully played by Anne Queffelec and Catherine Collard, has an elegance not far from the famous Gymnopédies. Film director Terrence Malick made use of its mysterious atmosphere in the soundtrack for his film Badlands. Tango This tiny little piece has the distinction of being the first tango written by a European composer of art music. It's one of a series of 21 pieces called Sports et Divertissements ("Sports and Diversions"), in which Satie portrays the kinds of healthy outdoor activity coming into fashion in 1914; sailing, swings, golf, picnics. Plus some indoor ones like tangos. It must be the most aloof and least sexy tango ever written, and pianist Gabriel Tacchino certainly brings out its oddity. Prélude de la Porte Héroïque du Ciel One of the many strange occult figures Satie got mixed up with was Jules Bois, a journalist who tried to establish a cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis in Paris. He wrote a play in which a poet/prophet tries to supplant the Virgin Mary from the Christian pantheon, and replace her with Isis. This prelude was meant to accompany one important scene. It has a lovely dignified beauty, created by chains of harmonically unrelated chords - a technique we associate with Debussy, but Satie actually got there first. The pianist in this performance is Joanna MacGregor.