Oddlet: Erik Satie · 1 min read
Mar 10, 2026
The Man Who Never Opened His Mail
When Satie died, his friends entered his apartment for the first time in twenty-seven years.
Erik Satie wrote music that sounded like nothing anyone had heard before. His piano pieces were spare, strange, and quietly radical — the seeds of what would eventually become minimalism, ambient music, and inspire virtually every composer who decided that less might be more.
He also founded a church in which he was the only member, ate — or claimed to eat — only white foods, and walked ten miles to work every day carrying an umbrella and a hammer.
Satie titled his compositions the way other people title pranks. Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear. Desiccated Embryos. His performance directions included "with much illness" and "light as an egg." After a critic savaged his ballet Parade in 1917, Satie mailed him a postcard reading, "Sir and dear friend — you are an arse, an arse without music." The critic sued. At the trial, Satie's friend Jean Cocteau was arrested for repeatedly yelling "arse" in the courtroom.
The ballet prompted the poet Guillaume Apollinaire to describe the production in the programme notes as "a kind of surrealism" — the first recorded use of the word.
When Satie died in 1925, his friends entered his apartment for the first time in twenty-seven years. They found two pianos stacked on top of each other, both with broken strings. Over a hundred umbrellas. Lost masterpieces stuffed behind the furniture. And years of unopened mail.
The man who accidentally named surrealism never even read his reviews.
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- Encyclopædia Britannica — High reliability; standard reference for dates, key works, and musical context.
- Wikipedia – Erik Satie — Good aggregated sourcing; cross-checked against primary biographies (Templier 1932, Myers 1948, Orledge). Use with verification.
- Wikipedia – Vexations — Detailed and well-cited article on the piece's history and Cage's 1963 performance; corroborated by multiple specialist sources.
- Wikipedia – Parade (ballet) — Detailed sourcing on the 1917 premiere, the Apollinaire coinage of "surrealism," and the Poueigh libel trial.
- London Review of Books – "Velvet Gentleman" by Nick Richardson — High reliability; literary/critical biography drawing on primary sources including Milhaud's firsthand account of the apartment.
- Flypaper / Soundfly — Moderate reliability; good secondary synthesis, useful for eccentric details, but should be cross-checked.
The Hatchery Sessions
What does a composer do when the bulldozers show up before the last take is finished?
The Vanishing of the Inventor of Cinema
Three weeks before the demonstration that would have made him the undisputed inventor of cinema, he boarded a train and stopped existing.
I Have Not The Time
In prison, drunk for the first time, he told his cellmates he would die in a duel over a woman. Nine months later, a woman wrote him a letter.
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