Books
Ian Penman
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite
I fell backwards through Brian Eno to Erik Satie a long time ago and I’ve never really returned. It was 1986, I was playing in a Melbourne band, part of whose schtick was ambience, when I found a second-hand LP of Satie’s piano works at the Camberwell market. What Eno called ambient music, Satie had named furniture music, or “musique d’ameublement” many decades before. I loved Eno, but here was piano music that surrounded you without synthesisers and studio reverb. It was all in the notes and the spaces between them. I’d been having a shit year and Satie came like a tonic. This was music you could rest on, think with, look at. Without your direct attention it remained elegantly empty, and with your attention it was both cushioning and funny. I was hooked.
Satie was born in Honfleur in coastal Normandy in 1866, “a maritime child with a coastal sensibility”. After moving to Paris he wrote all his best-known work in his 20s – namely the Gymnopédies that are on such high rotation on chillout playlists, and the more dynamic Gnossiennes. He was a brilliant writer as well as a musician and “Gnossienne” is his own neologism, a hybrid of “gnostic” and “madeleine” that provides a perfect match for what Ian Penman describes as the “shadow-tinted joy” of the music it names.
This etymology of “Gnossiennes” is but one of many entertaining ingredients that Penman furnishes us with in Erik Satie Three Piece Suite, his first book since the much-acclaimed Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors, which is also as much about Penman’s own relationship to the artist-subject as the subject itself. The book is divided into three formally disparate sections, the first a 48-page relatively traditional account in prose of Satie’s enigmatic biography and creative arc, the second a whimsically discursive glossary of terms associated with Satie and his ideas, and the third a more hermetic diary of Penman’s own musings on his writerly engagement with Satie’s work and style.
The fact that Penman wrote for the popular music magazine NME for many years is evident here. He admits to being put off classical music as a child by all the “big puffed-up symphonies and self-important concertos”. This legacy is something he is obviously still wrestling with when he wonders whether it might help his understanding of Satie if he actually played piano himself, or at the very least had some music theory.
Well, if a dog thinks with its nose, a pianist thinks with the fingers, and in no composer is this quite so evident as in the arpeggiated witticisms of Satie’s music. An instructive text here would be John Eliot Gardiner’s 2014 biography of J. S. Bach, Music in the Castle of Heaven, where the conductor and musician turned author describes the difference between listening to and playing Bach as being akin to standing on the beach looking at the ocean as opposed to diving in. It’s a rare writer that also has Gardiner’s musicianship, so we’ll forgive Penman that, and it must also be said that his portrait of Satie has the great merit of being aware of its own limitations.
One of the most rewarding things about Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is how generative it is. As with Alex Ross’s now classic The Rest Is Noise, or Geoff Dyer’s recent book on late style, The Last Days of Roger Federer, if you read Penman with the internet nearby you’ll be there all year, such are the dots he joins between Satie’s ideas and his various compositions for orchestra, ballet and voice, and with other stars of the Satiean firmament, Francis Poulenc or Fernando Pessoa, Emahoy Tsegué Maryam Guèbrou or Suzanne Valadon.
The structure of fragment and diary that Penman adopts, while in keeping with the obliquities of his subject, is by now also somewhat of a signature of the Fitzcarraldo imprint, where other works by Kate Briggs, Brian Dillon and Annie Ernaux fold the rhythms of quotidian life into their formal choices to great effect. While Penman’s knowledge comes across at times as that of any bedsit omnivore, he is nonetheless a lucid wordsmith intelligently dedicated to anti-pomposity. This allows his book to at least approximate Satie’s own expertise in the techniques of disjuncture and repetition, rather than just providing a stocktake of the Velvet Gentleman’s ideas. By avoiding hagiography in this way, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is something of an adherent to the Satie-ish ambition Italo Calvino adopted in Italy after the vile excesses of D’Annunzio and the Fascists: that is, to remain a minor writer.
Whatever the case, Penman is unabashed about his passion for a modern cultural trickster whose enigma remains intact partly because he lived right on the cusp of what now seems like the gravitational invasions of mass media. This suited not only Satie’s lifestyle of peri-urban privacy but also his preferred compositional style of leaving space around the note. The upshot is that apart from his own fragmentary and profoundly absurdist journals – A Mammal’s Notebook, Memoirs of an Amnesiac and so on – a few biographies and the odd photo of his impeccably anachronistic dress sense, all we really have is the music. Which might in part explain why for many years now I have driven a battered old algae-green ute with a single CD on permanent rotation: the piano works of Erik Satie. Whose final words when he died in 1925 were: “Ah! The cows…”
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 224pp, $32.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 16, 2025 as "Erik Satie Three Piece Suite".
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