Child of the stars.

Posted by Ahmed Anzaldúa on April 22, 2010. 2 comments

Erik Satie wrote the music for a pretentious play called Le fils des étoiles (The child of the stars) by self-entitled “super magician imperator” Sar Peladan, leader of an order of Rusicrucians and obsessed with mysticism (particularly that of Wagner). This composition by Satie included incidental music for the whole play, probably scored for flutes and harps (and recently re-orchestrated for that instrumentation by Toru Takemitsu), but Satie only published the preludes to each act for piano. The prelude to act one, La Vocation, is a surprisingly advanced piece of music. 

The music is very immobile and detached, a complete departure from the prevailing aesthetic of Wagnerian romanticism –the irony of this work being used for a play for a sect that included Wagner in their daily prayers was certainly not lost on Satie. More than an homage, this piece is a rebuttal to Wagner’s musical aesthetic.

The score has no bar-lines or time signature, something that hadn’t been done since the renaissance. In this piece, for the first time in history, there is a systematic use of chords –in fourths, no less– moving in parallel motion, three years before Debussy’s famous use of parallel harmony (also known as planing) in his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Unlike Debussy which, in this period, was still using traditional harmonic functions and writing tonal music, the preludes to Le fils des étoiles are atonal and the parallel-moving tritone on top of the fourths already makes possible a proto-polytonality, due to the voices moving in completely different tonal planes. In only a few minutes of music, Satie uses harmonic techniques that were unheard of in the music of his time and predates an aesthetic that has much more in common with the music of Morton Feldman or Toru Takemitsu than with any of his contemporaries.

There are many problems with the interpretation of Satie. Many pianists fail by trying to make the music “exciting”, worried about boring their audience. Although it is also easy to lose oneself in a work that is so open to interpretation, often without time marks of any kind and with cryptic, sometimes humorous music directives such as “on the tip of the tongue.” Players often get distracted by the eccentricity of Satie’s personality and the often bizarre indications on his scores but, beyond the surface, there is amazing, revolutionary music in these still, immobile compositions.