How Erik Satie’s ‘Furnishings Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Approach for Ambient Music
Imagine what number of instances someone born within the eighteen-sixties might ever anticipate to listen to music. The number would differ, in fact, relying on the individual’s class and family inclinations. Suffice it to say that every probability would have been extra precious than these of us within the twenty-first century can easily beneathstand. Our ability to listen to practically any music we might possibly want on command has modified our relationship to the artwork itself. Most of us now relate to it not as we might a special, even momentous occasion, however as we do to the water and electricity that come out of our partitions — or, to place it in mid-nineteenth-century phrases, as we do to our furniture.
Regardless of having been born in 1866 himself, Erik Satie beneathstood humanity’s have to listen to music without actually listening to it. The Contained in the Rating video above tells the story of how he developed musique d’ameublement, or “furniture music.” The artist Fernand Léger, a buddy of Satie’s, recalled that after the 2 of them had been subjected to “unbearin a position vulgar music” in a restaurant, Satie spoke of the necessity for “music which might be a part of the ambience, which might take account of it. I imagine it being melodic in nature: it will comfortableen the noise of knives and forks without dominating them, without imposing itself.” The end result was 5 deliberately ignorin a position compositions, every tailored to an ordinary area, which he wrote between 1917 and 1923.
Regarded in his lifetime much less as a decent composer than an unserious eccentric, he solely managed to get a type of items performed — and even when he did, eachone ignored his instructions to speak as an alternative of listening. It was effectively after his demise (in 1925) that such also-unconventional musical figures as John Cage and Brian Eno grew to become well-known for works similarly premised on a re-imagination of the relationship between music and listener. Eno, in particular, is now credited with the development of “ambient music” due to his albums like Music for Airports. Their popularity positively wouldn’t have surprised Satie; whether or not he might have foreseen ten-hour combinees of “chill lo-fi beats to check to” is another question totally.
Related content:
Hear the Very First Items of Ambient Music, Erik Satie’s Furniture Music (Circa 1917)
When Erik Satie Took a Picture of Debussy & Stravinsky (June 1910)
Brian Eno Explains the Origins of Ambient Music
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
