ERIK Satie is known to audiences around the world as the composer of three Gymnopédies (1888), piano pieces which are more popular than any others of his place and time, the Paris of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has always been a ‘crossover’ composer who appeals well beyond classical music audiences. But Satie is more than a composer of short, memorable and technically unchallenging piano pieces. He was also embedded in the social milieu and artistic environment of Paris and he collaborated with some of the best-known artists and writers of his day. A highly experimental artist and a radical in both art and politics, he often concealed his views behind an ironic or jokey surface. This book situates Satie firmly in the Paris of his time and focuses both on well-known pieces and works which are barely known at all. Some of these rare pieces are available as recordings that accompany this book.

Satie witnessed cataclysmic change in his lifetime. From abject defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1, France re-emerged as one of the most dynamic, innovative and artistically vibrant countries in Europe. Sound recording was a concept dreamed up by the Montmartre poet and amateur scientist Charles Cros, though Thomas Edison patented the phonograph and was the toast of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Street lighting by electric arcs coexisted with gaslight by the turn of the century and eventually superseded gas; Paris’ nickname ‘the City of Light’ might have originally derived from its status at the centre of the Enlightenment, but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw it take a literal turn. The telephone was introduced to France in 1879 and the first transatlantic calls were made from Arlington, Virginia to Paris in October 1915. In 1892, Leon Bouly patented the film camera (cinématographe), though the Lumiere brothers were the first to exploit the new invention. And the Paris Metro opened in July 1900, during the other major Exposition Universelle in the city during Satie's lifetime. While he was not always an active or willing participant in these changes – for instance, Satie hated the telephone, preferring the beautifully calligraphed written word – the Paris he knew as a child was transformed by developments in communications, technology, transport and society.