150歳のサティ - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Nick Shave “Erik Satie: Prepare yourself …” https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/25/erik-satie-vexations-furniture-music

今年はエリック・サティが生まれてちょうど150年目である*1。
曰く、

Satie is the maverick who invented “furniture music”, sounds that were designed to be heard but not listened to, long before Muzak was branded and sold. He created one of the earliest examples of “prepared piano”, fixing sheets of paper between the strings so as to alter the way it sounds. The unperformable directions on his scores – “open your head”, “be invisible for a moment” – mark them out as a precursor to conceptual art. Vexations*2, too, offers the earliest use of extended repetition in a piano piece, pre-empting the phase loops of Steve Reich *3, the arpeggios of Philip Glass *4 and dancing melodic fragments of Terry Riley*5. “It’s not a question of Satie’s relevance,” Cage famously declared. “He’s indispensable.”

サティといえば誰もが想起するジャン・コクトーやピカソやマン・レイや露西亜バレエ団といった（音楽を超えた巴里の〈藝術圏〉における人間関係や現代音楽の先駆者としての世界的な名声にも拘わらず、仏蘭西音楽界におけるサティの評判は（近年に至るまで）決して高いものではなかった；

Yet Satie was continually frustrated in his attempts to be accepted as an artist in high society France – his failure to establish himself at the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts, to which Debussy had won a scholarship, only compounded his resentment. Was this treatment by the cultural elite fair? Certainly his determination to antagonise his audience in his late ballets did little to endear him to the critics, but the fierce criticism he received in Paris was also a sign of things to come. Pierre Boulez *6 would later poke fun at Satie’s lack of craft, while composer Jean Barraqué*7 – another proponent of 12-tone music – would deride Satie as “an accomplished musical illiterate … who found that his friendship with Debussy was an unhoped-for opportunity to loiter in the corridors of history”. According to Pascal Rogé*8, the snobbery shows no sign of abating. “Satie has always been treated unfairly – especially in France where he is considered a clown,” he says. “It’s funny how the French have much more respect for Berg and Schoenberg than Satie. People still look down on him as if to say, ‘This is not music, it’s not serious.’”

英語圏における再評価。セリー主義vs.ミニマリズム；

Underlying this criticism is the great battle that gathered momentum after the second world war: on the one side, those avant-garde composers, such as Messiaen and Boulez, who embraced the complexity of serialism; and on the other, Cage and his minimalist followers, who harked after music of simpler means. As minimalism crossed the Atlantic, so interest in Satie’s music grew in Britain. Gavin Bryars *9, who performed Vexations with Christopher Hobbs*10 in 1971, studied the French composer’s harmonies in detail and drew on them in his work; Howard Skempton, too, started sculpting hypnotic Satiesque miniatures. Brian Eno directly answered Satie’s call for “music that would be a part of the surrounding noises” in his ambient Music for Airports*11. And even after minimalism outgrew its origins, the composers associated with repetitive means continued to pay tribute – you’ll find Satie echoing in the melancholic atmospheres of Arvo Pärt*12’s Für Alina, in John Adams *13’s Gymnopédies-inspired piano concerto Century Rolls and the folkish piano miniatures of Ludovico Einaudi*14, not to mention the electronic music of Aphex Twin *15. At 150 years old, the French composer is both everywhere and absent.

Ambient 1: Music for Airports

アーティスト: Brian Eno
出版社/メーカー: Astralwerks
発売日: 2004/10/05
メディア: CD
購入: 3人クリック: 12回
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さて、このNick Shave氏の記事の最初の部分で、1963年の紐育におけるジョン・ケージらによる『ヴェクサシオン』初演のことが言及されている。後にヴェルヴェット・アンダーグラウンドを結成することになるジョン・ケイルもこの初演に参加していた。日本における初演の話が東野芳明『裏切られた眼差』に採録されていたか。