We were right about Erik Satie. Since Pierre-Daniel Templier's biography, most of the pioneering work has been done by the British and the North Americans. Each enthusiast had a role to play at the time. Constant Lambert incorporated Satie into his diagnosis of musical society and Wilfrid Mellers was on the scent by 1937 in The Listener and again in Music & Letters in 1942. Rollo Myers, on the spot as a correspondent for British newspapers in Paris from 1919, was well placed to write the first study of Satie's music. It served its purpose admirably, but by the time the American edition came out, the lack of factual information was only too apparent. Patrick Gowers's Cambridge PhD thesis of 1966 put Satie studies on a new level, but frustratingly, it has never been published. James Harding was best at biography and the French scene of the period, but seemed aware only of Gowers's work on the Rose-Croix music.

On the American side of the Atlantic, Virgil Thomson was one of the earliest disciples, although, as I have argued, Gertrude Stein may have been more influential than Satie in forming Thomson's own technique. Her attitude was based on a kind of automatic writing, which Thomson admits was his own practice: Satie, however, worked painstakingly, as Robert Orledge proves in his study. On his deathbed Satie told Robert Caby: ‘No one will be able to say later that I have written a note which has no meaning, or which I have not carefully planned.’ The connection between Satie and John Cage is significant throughout most of Cage’s career. In making this point in 1967 for a British readership sceptical about Cage, I myself needed to put the sort of case for Cage that had been made for Satie a generation before: ‘His work and ideas show remarkable consistency and are an important part of the predicament of contemporary music. … If, as seems likely, Cage's ideas gain wider currency and his music becomes better known the example of Satie will again be responsible.’