SATIE liked to organise his music in groups of three, and variety within a triptych was of little or no interest to the composer. The series of contrasting movements typical of the Austro-German sonata tradition is completely foreign to Satie: pieces such as Gymnopédies and Jack in the Box may be threefold, but all three are based on a small amount of similar musical material which is constantly reiterated and hardly varied at all. Pushed to extremes, music of this type could simply be a repeating loop, with no variation or contrast whatsoever. This chapter deals with Satie's works for which repetition, usually of indeterminate duration, is their raison d’être – works which are therefore closer to the mechanical aesthetic than any others in Satie.

Ornella Volta stresses that the concept of background music was present in Satie's work almost from the beginning: initially his conception was music as decoration, almost as wallpaper. She writes:

Le Fils des étoiles was composed for the salon of the Rose-Croix du Temple and rehearsed in public on 22 March 1892, the play having been turned down by two more prestigious Parisian theatres, the august Comédie-Française and the more experimental Odâon. Satie's contribution to ‘Sâr’ Joséhin Péladan's play was three preludes, one for each act of the play, and three Sonneries de la Rose+Croix for trumpets and harps. The acts, titled ‘La Vocation’, ‘L’Initiation’ and ‘L’Incantation’, show the intended devotional flavour of this multimedia work.