"After having been ignored or despised during his lifetime, composer Erik Satie and his concepts and ideas are an all–time favorite target of “colonial appropriation” by art and industry alike. His Musique d’Ameublement is no exception....
more"After having been ignored or despised during his lifetime, composer Erik Satie and his concepts and ideas are an all–time favorite target of “colonial appropriation” by art
and industry alike. His Musique d’Ameublement is no exception. Perhaps the boldest and most provocative intellectual gesture of his production, the series of the Musiques d’Ameublement was, as we will see later on, essentially a failure during his existence and went on being forgotten for about another thirty years after his death, until John Cage resuscitated them out of oblivion with his long–time dedication and wit. Since then, the cohort of eccentric artists of all sorts that call themselves “followers” of Satie, his “Furniture Music”, his “Vexations”, etc. grows every day with unresting pace. The Musiques d’Ameublement are said to be at the origin of musique concrete, then of minimal music, then of ambient music, and so on (cf.[Rowley, 2004]). Even Cage seemed attracted more by the ability of Satie’s surrealist ideas to explain his own thinking about music at an early stage – rather than by their extraordinary appearance in the context in which Satie was operating (cf.[Cage, 1961]).
This short paper will attempt to sketch a different point of view on the Musique d’Ameublement– setting it as a starting point for a wider exercise on the evolution of the functions of music.
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