I can’t get no Satiesfaction

After peaking at around the tenth instalment, birthday celebrations get progressively less interesting, for their subjects at least. I remember the lunch we held for my great-aunt Winnie’s 100th birthday. It was a jolly affair and she received the toast with a fine speech of thanks. When the cheering subsided, she delivered the speech again, verbatim.

Classical music nowadays seems largely to be propped up by birthday celebrations for people who couldn’t care less, mostly because they’re dead. For some decades, the planning of concert seasons has come down to whether the number of years since a composer died or was born has a zero on the end of it. Perhaps in 2050 we’ll celebrate the bicentenary of the centenary of Bach’s death, since 1850 was the first year the centenary business really established itself. Pop music is of course heading the same way (with its piffling double-digit numbers), but that’s small comfort really because, however you look at it, life should involve more than the sending of birthday cards and souvenirs to oneself.

In Cheltenham and one or two other picturesque market towns with broad pavements, such as Kensington, they’re celebrating Erik Satie’s 150th birthday. If one is suspicious about centennial commemorations in general, then one should be particularly suspicious about celebrating an artist like Satie. The culture of hushed reverence for one’s elders and betters governed the profession of classical music in Satie’s heyday scarcely less than it does today. And if Satie was clear about one thing, it was that he was against hushed reverence.

This was probably why, on first gaining notice in the Bohemian circles of Le Chat Noir cabaret, Satie styled himself not as a fusty old composer but as a ‘gymnopédist’. It’s a label that might get one lynched in modern Britain (and indeed, a gymnopédie, as Satie would have known from reading Rousseau’s suitably irreverent music dictionary, was a piece to which young Spartan girls were supposed to have danced naked).