Satie’s Spell
Jeremy Denk on Erik Satie
In the Review’s January 15, 2026, issue, the concert pianist Jeremy Denk writes about Erik Satie, “the truest bad boy of musical modernism in the hypercompetitive market of Paris before World War I.” For casual listeners who know Satie as the composer of, say, the Gymnopédies (as Denk characterizes them, “a concentrated wistfulness—essence of rainy Parisian café, possibly right after a breakup”), it may come as a surprise to learn that he was also the composer of a postcard to a critic he addressed as “Monsieur Fuckface…Famous Gourd and Composer for Nitwits.”
Below, alongside Denk’s essay, are five articles from our archives about Satie, Dmitri Shostakovich, Arnold Schoenberg, Jeremy Denk, and playing the piano.
Erik Satie was the truest bad boy of musical modernism in the hypercompetitive market of Paris before World War I, crammed with aspiring bad boys. He took up pieties and profaned them. He took up blasphemy and somehow blasphemed against that. His music is ingeniously confounding. It received no shortage of vicious criticism, and Satie responded in kind. A postcard to the critic and composer Jean Poueigh began, “Monsieur Fuckface...Famous Gourd and Composer for Nitwits.” He lost the ensuing libel suit, adding to his eternal financial woes. Among his many achievements, he’s near the top of the (long) list of self-destructive classical composers.
The most appropriate essay about Satie would itself scandalize, forcing readers to laugh while being ridiculed, all the while summoning the spirit of the age. Perhaps a series of bot tweets or AI semitruths? In that spirit I asked ChatGPT to opine on Satie and modernity, and in seconds it homed right in on my intended angle: Satie as antidote to the pretensions of classical music. I was furious. If a chatbot could predict my thesis, what was the point of retelling this Icarus story of the world-spanning ambitions of the nineteenth century and Satie, who composed quirky and haunting miniatures to try to melt its wings?
What is the point? is of course one of the main points of Satie. You don’t get the same sensation, for instance, listening to The Rite of Spring, Salome, Wozzeck, or Pierrot lunaire. As shocking or boundary-testing as those modernist masterpieces may be, they all have a point, and they work. They offer dramatic shapes, vectors, formal conceits; they expose sharp contrasts or conflicts. Mostly, Satie’s pieces don’t work in those ways, and they leave the question of a point open at best.
So how exactly does Satie take down the arrogance of late Romantic classical music? Consider the Sarabandes, Satie’s first suite of dances, from September of 1887. They begin with three lubricious seventh chords. The last, a chord that “should” lead forward, sits and lingers in the air. We hear five more chords, full of branching possibilities—but end up in the same place. This feels a bit neutralizing, if not yet frustrating. The third phrase travels more purposefully, and we soon arrive at an A major chord—a normal triad. But it’s notated on the page as arcane B-double-flat major, making it hard to read and even more irritating to write about. (A trivial distinction that also screws with your head is a perennial Satie combination.) This is the first of many arrivals sprinkled about the score, an abundance of goals that paradoxically don’t produce a sense of direction. Here we are is always followed by Where are we? Satie displays an astonishing instinct for sapping any would-be narrative. The pianist seeking momentum to guide an interpretation is out of luck. You have the feeling that all the most beautiful, most French chords have wandered out of their cages at the classical zoo and, somewhat sedated, are now roaming free across the plains of art with no apparent agenda.
If you listen to a lot of late Romantic French music (Fauré, Chausson, Franck), you may be familiar with the feeling of too much—too much richness and rapture. This language is a festival of extended chords (sevenths, ninths, elevenths), deployed through an orgy of arpeggios. It surges and throbs. Satie takes up this same vocabulary but removes all the excess. He is gently ruthless. Arpeggios are banished—an almost antipianistic gesture. It is striking (or perverse) to make something so bare from chords that are so lush.
This language is inimitable—and also retreats from authorship. The music, rotating through its enigmatic ideas, evokes AI chatbots when their algorithms have run out of primary thoughts and begin to cycle through plausible tautologies. ChatGPT confesses its lack of intentionality: “I, as an AI don’t have: Desires, Goals, Inner states, Intentional consciousness”—as it happens, a near exact list of the things that Satie was trying to purge from music. I asked ChatGPT to explore this parallel further. “Like Satie’s music,” it responded, “what I produce can: 1) Resist depth in the Romantic sense; 2) Be read as a mirror rather than a window; 3) Feel alien or emotionally ambiguous.” That was remarkably good, and I didn’t know if my prompt had “created” it, what amount of authorship I still possessed, or if I should care—yet more layers of Satie.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
From the Archives: Practice Makes Perfect
Charles Rosen on playing the piano
Alfred Brendel on playing Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto
Anastasia Edel on Shostakovitch and her grandfather
Roger Shattuck on the mascot of modern music
Simon Callow on the memoir of a young pianist
