Music in the writing of Erik Satie

In Satie's lifetime, his music was appreciated by Debussy, his friend for thirty years, but also by younger composers (including Stravinsky, and the group including Poulenc and Milhaud which was at one time known as 'les Six') who saw themselves as in reaction against Debussy's aesthetic. Its reception since then has been similarly ambiguous, allowing it to appeal both to John Cage, and to music-lovers who reject atonality; it has been heard as both a disruptive musical Dada, and as congenial background music. The reason for this duality is simply that Satie's art can be read both as a logical development of the postromantic or symbolist aesthetic, and as representing a radical questioning of that aesthetic. It has long been recognized that this places Satie in an extraordinary position, at the meeting-point of the aesthetics of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, in the very definition of music that his work supposes.However, the writings of Erik Satie have never been examined to see exactly what light they can shed on this Janus-like position. His critical writings have now been published, as has his correspondance. Together with the poems and other texts which he wrote to set to music (or to print with his music), his play _Le Piège de Méduse_, and the libretto to his oratorio _Socrate_ (which he composed from Plato's dialogues as translated by Victor Cousin), they form a fascinating corpus. Its styles often seem to foreshadow the literary movements of his day: _Sports et Divertissements_ anticipates the spatial experimentation of Apollinaire's _Calligrammes_, while _Le Piège de Méduse_ seems to pre-echo the theatre of the Absurd.My research project begins from the question: how can these writings help us to situate Satie's art, and to understand what music meant to him? Such questions fit into the theoretical frame of what has become known as Word and Music Studies. It has been an area of growing interest and rapidly increasing theoretical maturity over the past two decades. Its leading proponents have mapped the way that music and words were related in the romantic and postromantic periods, and in many parts of the twentieth century. But the France of Satie's time has been little explored, surprisingly since so many of the great aesthetic upheavals of the century started there; and the writings of Satie have never been systematically interrogated.My aim is to remedy this. I will use the conceptual tools developed in the field of Word and Music Studies, as well as my knowledge of the literary and musical tradition out of which Satie's art grew (on which I have a book in press), in order to tease out of Satie's notoriously elusive texts answers to the questions: what, for him, do literature and music mean, if anything? how can one judge them, and what is their purpose and source? More particularly, how, for him, do words and music relate and interact? The answers will be of interest to musicologists and to Word and Music theorists, but also to specialists in French literature, both because Satie's texts are of considerable literary import in their own right, and because of the way his words and music reflect on the works of other writers at the time. But anyone interested in the decisive shift in aesthetics that took place at the beginning of the 20th century has, I think, a great deal to learn from the peculiar writings of this uniquely ambivalent figure, who holds, perhaps, the key to understanding how the old belief in Art and Beauty can be maintained alongside the modern scepticism towards all such essentialisms.