Caveat: Gnossiennes

I have an uncomfortable relationship with "classical" music. I almost never listen to it, despite having grown up on it, and despite having close friends and relatives who are classical musicians of various sorts. Most the time, if I listen to classical music, it's for only two reasons: 1) I'm with a friend or relative who's taking me along to something, or 2) I'm seeking some nostalgia for some point in my life, e.g. I sometimes return to Rachmaninoff or Bach bits that are deeply familiar to me.

Yet when I listen to classical music, I enjoy it. So why don't I seek it out? I speculated once to a friend that it was too "intellectually challenging" – that is, I'm unable to appreciate it as "background music" the way I listen to most music (and as my blog category attests: Background Noise).

Today, though, I actually discovered and enjoyed a new classical composer I'd literally never heard of before – at least that I can remember. Erik Satie was an active French composer at the turn of the last century (19th to 20th), associated with the avant garde and sometimes seen as a precursor to Debussy (whom I rather like, too).  I even ran across an anecdote that I thought amusing:  There was a Debussy concert once, and Satie was in the audience. After the performance, someone walked up to Satie and said, "Did Debussy steal that from you?" – to which Satie answered: "That is Satie, but Debussy does it better."

Satie liked to not just compose music, but tried to invent whole new genres and idioms. His music is still popularly used sometimes in movie soundtracks, too. One "genre" he coined was what he called a "gnossienne" – that's an utterly invented word, but ties to his dabblings in gnostic philosophy. I'm always appreciative of made-up words, and I like these little pieces very much.

What I'm listening to right now.

Erik Satie (composer), "Gnossienes 1-3." [update 2015-06-17: video link replaced as previous was broken]

Some of his works were much more unusual. He composed something he called "Vexations," which consisted of a snippet intended to be played slowly, and repeated 840 times. Here is someone performing the full 9 hours and 41 minutes. This is a hint as to why John Cage thought so highly of Satie.