Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (3 page)

He was very minimalist and so spacious in a time when everything around was Romantic and elaborate. Something about doing less to make the music more focused and pretty, I would like to say I’ve learned that from him.

Eric Satie (he changed the spelling of his first name later) was born in 1866 in the French port town of Honfleur, and moved to Paris at age 12 with his father, an amateur composer who owned a music shop. Soon after, the young Satie entered the prestigious Paris Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition. It was a disappointing experience for everyone involved. Feeling held back by the musical conventions of the day, he called the conservatory a “penitentiary bereft of beauty.” Unimpressed by Satie’s development as a pianist, teachers described him as “a very unimportant pupil.”

By his late teens, Satie was frequenting the Bohemian cafes of Paris’ Montmartre district and playing piano in nearby cabarets. The lively, melodic “pop” music he performed would prove influential when, around 1884, Satie began composing. Over the next decade he would pen what has turned out to be his best known material.

Satie’s early piano compositions – including
Trois Gymnopédies
from 1888 and 1890’s
Trois Gnossiennes
– are marked by their simple beauty and concise melodicism. Slow and hypnotic, but at times dissonant and full of unresolved chord progressions, these pieces sound strangely modern, even today. Their nonlinear, montage-like structure defied 19
^th
-century rules of composition, and have more in common with modern collage styles. Tranquil and dreamy, the
Gymnopédies
have been adopted into the repertoire of New Age and Muzak, and seven decades before the minimalists adopted the modes and repetition of non-Western music, Satie’s
Gnossiennes
reveal an influence of oriental music (which he likely first heard, as did Debussy, at the 1889 World Fair in Paris).

Eric Matthews:

Satie’s always been a part of my listening habit. It’s tranquil, yet still harmonically challenging and exciting. He achieves a peaceful mood that I hope is in my music. The quietness, the solitude. It’s affected some of us [pop songwriters] very deeply and become part of our own moods in our music.

With 1893’s
Vexations
, a short, neutral passage lasting one to two minutes, Satie created an important forerunner to avant-garde composition.
Vexations
’ directions call for it to be repeated 840 times, which requires up to 28 hours to play. The piece may be the earliest example of a loop, those repeating musical phrases so common in electronic music.

Alex Patterson, Orb:

At the end of the night, after going to the acid house clubs back in ‘88, coming home and putting Satie on was like touching heaven, really, on an ambient front. It gave me a lot of confidence to go in and put my hand on a piano and play sort of feminine chords.

Vexations
proved especially influential to
John Cage
, the leading figure in 20
^th
-century experimental music. Taking literally Satie’s instructions – ”to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities” –
Cage
was inspired to compose 4’33”, a piece where the performer sits silently at his instrument. And in 1963,
Cage
organized the first ever complete performance of
Vexations
, using an entire stable of pianists, including future Velvet Underground member
John Cale
. A more recent reprisal, in 1993, featured Soul Coughing’s Mark De Gli Antoni and composer
LaMonte Young
.

Words were central to Satie’s expression. He wrote absurdist prose, bits of which showed up in the titles of compositions (such as
Dried-Up Embryos
or
Three Pear-Shaped Pieces
) or were written on his scores as directions to the performer (for example, to play “like a nightingale with a toothache”). By the 1910s, these prose bits had become increasingly critical of 20
^th
-century life. His
Bureaucratic Sonatina
(1917) contains ironic running commentary such as “he dreams of promotion.”

In 1917 Satie composed the surrealist ballet
Parade
, a collaboration with Pablo Picasso (scenery) and Jean Cocteau (scenario).
Parade
utilized typewriters, rattles, steamships whistles, pistol shots, and sirens – sounds of the modern world. This musique mechanique would later be utilized by everyone from composer Edgard Varese to rappers Public Enemy.

Mark De Gli Antoni, Soul Coughing:

Satie was a big, big influence philosophically. The way Satie stuck a typewriter in the middle of
Parade
. Take a Soul Coughing song like “Sugar Free Jazz”: I was like, “Why can’t a seagull become a lead guitar?” [The sample] still sounds like a seagull, but if I place it where traditionally some other lead instrument would speak, will you for a moment stop thinking it’s seagulls and accept it as the lead melodic element, in a traditional song way?

Three years after mixing outside sounds into
Parade
, Satie attempted the opposite: to write music that would itself blend into the environment.
Furniture Music
, as he called his series of compositions, was meant strictly as background music. It was functional music for a modern society, meant to soften an aural environment polluted with clanging silverware and car horns. It was, essentially, the root of ambient music.

Satie was still largely an outsider when he died of liver disease (he was a long-time alcoholic) in 1925, at age 59. By then, though, a small group of French composers known as Les Six (including Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger) had acknowledged Satie as their spiritual father. While Satie’s work fell even further out of mainstream consciousness in the middle decades of this century, his music began to reemerge in the 1960s, thanks both to the influence of
John Cage
and to the popular recordings made by concert pianist Aldo Ciccolini of Satie’s works.

In recent years, Satie has been discovered by a growing number of rock musicians. In one year (1995-1996) Satie’s
Gnossienne No. 1
was sampled to great effect by both Folk Implosion (on the Kids soundtrack) and Drain, a side project of the Butthole Surfers’ King Coffey. As modern music catches up with Satie’s modernist visions, whole new generations are joining the Velvet Gentleman’s musical cult.

SELECTED WORKS

Trois Gymnopédies
(1888)
.

Trois Gnossiennes
(1890)
.

Vexations
(1893)
.

Pieces froides
(Cold Pieces)
(1897)
.

Trois Morceaux en forme de poire
(3 Pear-Shaped Pieces)
(1903)
.

Le piége de Méduse
(Medusa’s Trap)
(1913)
.

Embryons desséchés
(Dried-up Embryos)
(1913)
.

Sports et divertissements
(Sports and Diversions)
(1914)
.

Parade
(1917)
.

Sonatine bureaucratique
(Bureaucratic Sonatina)
(1917)
.

Socrate
(1918)
.

Musique d’ameublement
(Furniture Music)
(1920)
.

Relâche
(1924)
.

Cinéma Entr’acte symphonique
(1924)
.

RAYMOND SCOTT

Don Byron, jazz clarinetist [from his notes to Bug Music (Nonesuch, 1996)]:

Jazz historians have chosen to understate the importance of [Scott’s band] in their histories of American music. The reasons for this rejection have much to do with [the band’s] overt interest in classical music. This music lives in a zone somewhere between jazz and classical music. [Scott’s group] accomplished this in a time when such a mix of influences was considered even more unusual than it is today.

Whether or not we realize it, we’ve all heard Raymond Scott’s music; his manic, colorful vignettes appeared in over one hundred Looney Tunes cartoons (accompanying Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the rest). His primary influence lies in the way his music has reached young television watchers and shaped the way that generations have perceived the relationship between music and motion.

Scott’s music is quintessentially modern. He was interested in mechanical sounds, even when made by humans. In his works, he took on the role of writer, arranger, player, conductor, engineer, and inventor, thus blurring the lines between composer, performer, and technician and creating a new paradigm for the roles a modern recording artist could assume.

By unapologetically injecting classical elements into pop and jazz, his music did much to relieve art music’s burden of seriousness and break down the lines between high and low. His greatest contribution to 20
^th
-century music was, ironically, also the reason for his relative obscurity. Deemed too classical (or else too goofy) for jazz and not sober enough for classical, Scott fell through the cracks of music history.

The son of Russian immigrants, Raymond Scott was born Harry Warnow in 1908 in Brooklyn. At school he studied to be an engineer, until his older brother Mark – conductor of the CBS Radio Orchestra – convinced him to pursue music. After attending Julliard, Harry became pianist in his brother’s band and changed his name to Raymond Scott (which he picked from a phone book) to avoid charges of nepotism. Scott soon craved further artistic control and recruited five orchestra members to form his Raymond Scott Quintette. Though the group was actually a sextet – with saxophonist, clarinetist, trumpeter, bassist, drummer Johnny Williams (father of Star Wars composer/conductor John Williams), and Scott on piano – Scott preferred the sound of the word quintet. (In 1994, Stereolab – also a sextet – would name their record Mars Audiac Quintet in tribute to Scott).

Between 1937 and 1939, the Quintette’s music appeared both on radio and in films. Songs like
Powerhouse
and
The Toy Trumpet
were fast and intricate, full of instantly gratifying melodies and caricaturesque instrumentation that makes them clear precursors to the hi-fi lounge sounds of Esquivel and Martin Denny. Evocative titles like
Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals
and
Boy Scout in Switzerland
complemented the whimsical, bizarre tunes. Though the music sounded closest to swing jazz, it borrowed classical melodies and was far too fast and disjointed for dancing. It became popular as novelty music, but was reviled by critics as fake jazz.

Tom Maxwell, Squirrel Nut Zippers:

What Raymond Scott did was completely off the wall, very fucked up tonally. He brought in this weird, machine-like feel to music that’s generally very loose and emotive. He was a nut out of left field who made sounds nobody else was making.
Powerhouse
kicks my ass; I love the changed times, the bizarre key, the weird drum breaks, the strange intervals, and it’s really fun. I definitely took a page from his book [when] I wrote this orchestral song called The Kracken.” It’s strange, angular jazz – but not bop – some other sort of 20
^th
-century sounding thing.

A perfectionist, Scott showed each musician exactly what to play and forbade any improvisation. In the studio, he pioneered the kind of creative techniques later used by Beatles’ producer George Martin and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. An early adherent of overdubs and tape editing, Scott was also known to try things like dipping trumpets in water, or placing sea shells behind microphones, to get the sound he wanted.

In the early ‘40s, once the Quintette had expanded into the Raymond Scott Orchestra, Warner Bros, in-house composer Carl Stalling licensed a good deal of Scott’s work. Over the next two decades, bits and pieces of Scott’s tunes showed up in Stalling’s Looney Tunes scores. The playful, exaggerated themes proved a perfect match for the cartoon world (decades later, they would appear on The Ron and Skimpy Show as well), and this music would prove Scott’s most enduring legacy.

Mark De Gli Antoni, Soul Coughing:

I loved cartoon music, but it wasn’t until Soul Coughing put together “Bus to Beelzebub” – when we found this great cartoon that we had to [sample] – that I became aware Carl Stalling had taken stuff from Raymond Scott. [Soul Coughing’s] “Disseminated” is consciously a Raymond Scott tribute: a short piece, a wacky little phrase from
The Penguin
, completely built on his loop. And on “Zoom Zip,” the trumpet part is taken from Raymond Scott’s
The Toy Trumpet
, but slowed down and edited.