He Owned 12 Umbrellas.
He Invented Ambient Music. No One Was Allowed in His Room.

You are twenty-two, recently expelled from the Paris Conservatoire for lack of effort (your teachers said you had talent but refused to work), and living in Montmartre. You compose three pieces for piano: the Gymnopédies. They are unlike anything in the Western musical canon. They move slowly, without obvious development, their melodies hovering over ambiguous harmonies that don't resolve in the ways nineteenth-century music taught audiences to expect. They are not sad exactly, not dreamy exactly, but something that resists the usual emotional categories music criticism provides. They are about forty-five seconds each — barely pieces at all by the scale of the Romantic era. You title them with a word derived from ancient Greek dances. No one notices initially.

Debussy hears them. Debussy arranges two of them for orchestra in 1896. This is how the Gymnopédies enter the world — not through Satie's own efforts but through Debussy's orchestration making them audible to a wider audience. You are pleased. You say: "Debussy has orchestrated my Gymnopédies with a tact and understanding which I would not have shown." You are not possessive about the pieces. You are also not surprised that Debussy found them. You knew they were good.

You have been playing piano at the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre, composing, and associating with the bohemian and Rosicrucian circles of Paris — you briefly joined the Rosicrucian movement and composed mystical pieces for their ceremonies. You meet Suzanne Valadon — the painter (and mother of Utrillo) — and have a six-month love affair that is the only romantic relationship of your life. She ends it. You are devastated. You write her letters she doesn't answer. You never pursue another relationship. You move to a tiny room in the suburb of Arcueil and remain there for the rest of your life — twenty-seven years — walking the five miles to Paris and back every day. You allow no one to enter your room. You keep twelve gray velvet suits — identical — and twelve umbrellas — identical. You eat primarily at the local dairy. You are, by most external measures, eccentric to the point of dysfunction.

You are thirty-nine. Critics have been dismissing your work as amateurish — technically inadequate, unserious, the product of insufficient training. The composer Vincent d'Indy says publicly that you are "a self-taught musician." This is intended as an insult. You decide to prove the point redundant. You enroll at the Schola Cantorum — a rigorous music school in Paris — and complete a full three-year course in counterpoint under Albert Roussel. You are a middle-aged student among students young enough to be your children. You are already the composer of the Gymnopédies, which Debussy has orchestrated to wide recognition. You are studying counterpoint to demonstrate that the criticism is irrelevant. You are awarded the certificate with honors. Your compositional style changes not at all. You continue writing exactly as you did before, because you were writing correctly before. But no one can call you untrained again.

You have become a figure of influence among a generation of young composers who call themselves Les Six — Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc, Tailleferre, Durey, Auric. They look to you as a model: anti-Romantic, anti-pretentious, committed to simplicity and wit, suspicious of the grandiose. You give lectures with titles like "Intelligence and the Appreciation of Music by Animals." You write pieces called "Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear" (there are seven pieces). You add written instructions to your scores that are explicitly jokes: "Wonder about yourself," "Like a nightingale with a toothache," "Don't be afraid." You write the score for the ballet Parade in 1917 with a scenario by Jean Cocteau, sets by Picasso, and choreography for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. It causes a scandal. You are sued for defamation by the critic Jean Poueigh. The judge awards Poueigh 1,000 francs. You spend two weeks in jail. You are fifty-one years old, in jail, still walking to Paris from Arcueil. This is a satisfying situation.

Parade premieres at the Théâtre du Châtelet on May 18, 1917. The ballet includes Cubist costumes by Picasso, a scenario involving circus performers, and your score — which uses, for the first time in a ballet score, typewriters, pistol shots, and a foghorn as musical instruments. The premiere audience responds with outrage. Jean Poueigh, a critic who had praised the rehearsals, writes a negative review after the premiere. You send him a series of postcards addressed to "Monsieur and Dear Madam" calling him an ass. He sues for defamation. You are convicted and sentenced to eight days in prison (the sentence is later suspended but the fine stands). Cocteau physically attacks Poueigh in the lobby. The critic Apollinaire coins the word "Surrealism" in the program notes for Parade. The Ballets Russes performs the piece 26 more times. The scandal is, on balance, excellent for everyone except Poueigh, who is largely forgotten.

At an art exhibition in 1920, you present a new concept: "musique d'ameublement" — furniture music. You and a small ensemble perform short, repetitive musical pieces in the gallery between the paintings. The idea is that this music should function like furniture: present, part of the environment, not demanding to be listened to. During the performance, you walk around begging the audience to stop listening and resume their conversations — the music is background, it is not supposed to be the focus of attention. The audience, naturally, insists on sitting still and listening. You are furious. The concept has failed. It will be rediscovered by Brian Eno in 1978 as "ambient music" — which Eno describes as music that "can be either actively listened to with attention or as easily ignored, depending on the needs of the listener."

You die on July 1, 1925, of cirrhosis of the liver, at the Saint-Joseph clinic in Paris. You are fifty-eight. You have refused visitors during the final months, as you had refused visitors for the preceding twenty-seven years. After your death, your friends — Milhaud, Auric, Braque, Cocteau — enter your room in Arcueil for the first time. They find: the two pianos (one serving as desk), the twelve identical gray velvet suits, the twelve identical umbrellas, and piles of manuscript paper including scores of works that had never been performed and that no one had known existed. There are newspaper clippings, letters, and the scores for pieces written in complete secrecy — "Vexations," a piece with the instruction that it should be performed 840 times consecutively (the first complete performance, in 1963, takes eighteen hours and forty minutes). The room is finally visible. It was always full.

The French musical world of the early 20th century divided into those influenced by Debussy's impressionism and those influenced by Satie's anti-romanticism. The composers who called themselves Les Six — Milhaud, Poulenc, Honegger — acknowledged Satie as their model. John Cage, who encountered the Gymnopédies in the 1940s and organized the first complete performance of Vexations in 1963, said Satie was the most important musical influence of his life. Brian Eno cited "furniture music" as the origin of ambient music. Minimalism — Glass, Reich, Riley — is directly descended from the temporal experiments of the Gymnopédies. The piano music that plays at the beginning of a film when everything is quiet, the music in airport lounges, the background textures of electronic music — all of it is, in some sense, Satie's room in Arcueil, still being heard, long after the door was finally opened.