Erik Satie (1866-1925) is perhaps one of the most peculiar composers available in current musical encyclopaedias. His odd musical and personal style made him an outsider all his life as nobody could simply say that he would belong to any particular group of composers. Because of that, it's hardly strange that he didn't occur at all in the prominent musical encyclopaedias until 40-50 years after his death when many contemporary composers started mentioning him as an important source of inspiration.

While many of his successful colleagues belonged to certain categories based on the works they did, Satie did the best he could not do be categorized at all. He wanted to be unique, an inventor of new musical ideas. Nobody could say to Satie that "you belong to the ---ists"... That would be a total failure to him.

In the late 1880's and early 1890's he began his composing career with some strange and tasteful dissonant chords without bars and keys, thus avoiding the common way of writing music. The titles were strange too, influenced by the medieval and the Greek ancient history. Thanks to an heritage and the financial support from his father, he managed to publish some of his earliest works. His work as a conductor and pianist at the trendy café Chat Noir in the hills of Montmartre, a place which attracted many of the artists who lived in the neighbourhood, helped him in the marketing of his works which can be shown in some of the magazines that were published at the time.

It was also at this time, and in these surroundings, when he met Claude Debussy. The 4 year older Debussy was an excellent pianist with good theoretical skills. One can imagine the fruitful relationship that these composers had. Debussy was the accomplished pianist and musician who gave Satie important advise while Debussy received many musical ideas from Satie which he realized in several of his works. In the 1910's their friendship ended. One of the reasons may be that Debussy fell into a categorized composing style. According to Satie, he had turned from a creative spirit into an old buffer who was content with being one of the impressionists and never caring to change it.

Satie's music was nearly forgotten for more than 30 years after his death and the turning point came when John Cage and others performed the very first concert of the enigmatic piano piece Vexations and when Satie's former friend Robert Caby a couple of years later published many of the appreciated posthumous works with Salabert. After that, Satie's acknowledgment as an important composer has become a fact and several of his own developed styles are now evident sources of inspiration for many of the current generation of composers. His timeless approach to music is now paying off. Despite that, he is still rather unknown.

Thanks to Ornella Volta (head of the Satie archives in Paris) and Robert Orledge (music professor of the University of Liverpool) there are nowadays many excellent academic resources available about this composer. We own these people, as well as Satie's now deceased friends Robert Caby, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc, the gratitude for spreading their knowledge about this remarkable composer.