Erik Satie

Satie earned a modest living as a pianist at the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre before moving to the nearby Auberge du Clou, where he formed a close, mutually influential friendship with Claude Debussy. It was at the Auberge that Satie first met Joséphin Péladan — a flamboyant self-styled "Sâr" (a title borrowed from ancient Chaldean royalty) who had recently broken from an earlier Rosicrucian faction in what contemporaries called "the War of the Two Roses" and founded his own splinter order, the Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal.

By 1891 Satie held the formal title of composer and chapel-master to Péladan's order, writing ceremonial music for the sect's fashionable salons at the Galerie Durand-Ruel — the annual Salon de la Rose+Croix, which ran from 1892 to 1897 and gave Satie his first real public hearings as a composer. Péladan's order revered Wagner above all composers; Satie's own music for it was pointedly the opposite — remote, static, deliberately non-dramatic.

His Sonneries de la Rose+Croix (1892), three short piano pieces written with no bar lines to imply a free, ritual sense of time, remain his clearest surviving statement from this period. He also composed Le Fils des étoiles (1891), seventy-five minutes of incidental music for a Péladan stage play subtitled a "Chaldean Pastoral," scored for the unusual combination of flutes and harps — though only three short Preludes were performed at the 1892 premiere, and these preludes, later arranged for solo piano, are how the score is chiefly known today.

The break came quickly: by autumn 1892 Satie had left Péladan's circle entirely, moving on to his own independent projects with the poet Contamine de Latour. In 1898 he settled permanently in the Paris suburb of Arcueil, where — in a detail biographers have long found telling — he never once allowed a visitor into his room for the rest of his life.

Satie's Rosicrucian period was brief — barely two years — but the aesthetic habits it reinforced (repetition, deliberate flatness of affect, resistance to conventional dramatic climax) carried directly into the mature style that made him influential: his 1917 concept of musique d'ameublement ("furniture music," meant to be heard without being listened to) is now recognised as a direct ancestor of ambient music. His decades-long friendship with John Cage, who considered Satie a central influence and staged elaborate tributes to him late in his own career, closes a strange circle: two composers a half-century apart, both drawn to music stripped of conventional narrative drive, one via a Rosicrucian chapel and the other via the I Ching.