DID SATIE MEET GROVLEZ?

In the dazzling, café-filled artistic world of fin-de-siècle Paris, composers, painters, poets, and performers constantly crossed paths. Among them stood Erik Satie and Gabriel Grovlez — two distinctive musical personalities. But did they ever meet? Did they share conversation, collaboration, or even a few fleeting artistic “moments” of their own?

Thinking first about the far better-known figure, Erik Satie, there is a tendency to highlight the eccentricity of certain individuals, and he is a striking example. We know what he wore, that he fell out with Debussy, and that he had just one disastrous love affair with Suzanne Valadon — acrobat, trapeze artist, and painter.

He became deeply religious for a time, submitting himself to the Mystical Order of the Rose and Cross of the Temple and Grail, an occult sect founded by Joséphin Péladan. After falling out with Péladan, he founded his own sect, the Église Métropolitaine d’Art de Jésus Conducteur, of which he was the sole congregant.

He lived alone and is said to have always walked out with his umbrellas. Later anecdotal accounts even suggest that he carried a hammer for self-defence. Reportedly, he never used soap, preferring a pumice stone, and he wore only grey velvet suits. He died relatively young from cirrhosis of the liver.

His somewhat unsuccessful sojourn at the Paris Conservatoire won him the dubious accolade — if it can be called that — of being declared the laziest student in the conservatoire. However, in maturity, he returned to formal study at the Schola Cantorum as a deeply committed student.

An example of his more extreme tendencies is Vexations, (don't worry! this is only a brief excerpt) written in 1893 for piano, consisting of 180 notes to be repeated 840 times.

Satie directed: “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in deepest silence, through serious immobility.”

When it was presented in New York in 1963, it took John Cage and his relay team of pianists 18 hours and 40 minutes to perform the musical marathon, playing continuously.

Delving a little deeper into his work, we find he liked to adorn his musical manuscripts with unusual phrases and strange instructions. He gave some pieces of music seemingly absurd titles. In collaboration with Picasso, Cocteau, and Diaghilev, he wrote the ballet Parade, often regarded as an early proto-surrealist work. The term “surrealism” was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in connection with this work. Satie is identified as contributing a pathway to minimalism, and as having been an influence on composers like Cage, Feldman, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, John Adams, and Ludovico Einaudi.

The general public are very familiar with his Gymnopedies, as these have found homes in films and even adverts. But Satie wrote a great deal of other music. He was not a rigorous self-editor, and his catalogue requires some sifting. His published catalogue of works contains many lesser known gems alongside his well-known pieces, but also quite a lot of quirky sketches that seem incomplete.

While direct documentary evidence of a meeting between Satie and Grovlez remains elusive, their artistic environments overlapped strikingly.

This leads us to a very different character, a contemporary of his in the musical scene of fin-de-siècle Paris. Gabriel Grovlez studied under Fauré and became an acclaimed pianist, composer, and conductor. He appears to have been a rather formal and overall quieter character. Photographs show him sometimes sporting a rather impressive moustache — and sometimes not. He is described as elegant, refined, and witty. He is also recalled as being diplomatic, urbane, with a keen interest in reviving early music. He travelled to the United States and Africa, as well as across Europe, and conducted productions in Monte Carlo, Lisbon, Cairo, New York, and Chicago. He became professor of chamber music at the Paris Conservatoire in 1939.

Research reveals comparatively little about Gabriel Grovlez, although there may well be a treasure trove of letters, reviews, and personal documents resting in some as yet hidden archive awaiting discovery. It's plausible that Grovlez and Satie attended the same concerts or knew mutual acquaintances in the vibrant melting pot that the Parisian artistic community of the era was. Perhaps they met at the Opéra-Comique, where Grovlez was a conductor. Or within the Schola Cantorum and Paris Conservatoire circles. Both were certainly well embedded in Paris musical society. Grovlez was a young conservatoire musician whilst Satie was active in Parisian artistic circles. He played a role in introducing important works by Ravel to the public and was recognised by Ravel as a respected artistic collaborator. Grovlez premiered Ravel’s Sonatine and was praised for his musical sensitivity and refinement.

Stylistically, Satie and Grovlez can be said to present two parallel responses to French modernism. In performing their works, my own starting point in aligning these two composers is a sense that they shared a joy in creating massive fistfuls of slow-moving chord sequences. Digging further towards defining any links between them, they certainly did share aesthetic similarities with their employment of modal harmony and weighty, chordal progressions. For example, Satie’s 1st and 2nd Sarabandes are built on long, slow-moving chords, modal ambiguities, and unusual voice-leading. These pieces are dotted lavishly with challenging amounts of double flats and sharps. Grovlez’s Westminster Abbey (this is Dust's version, arranged for bass clarinet and piano) in his London Suite has formidable slow-moving handfuls of chords, requiring the right hand to reach quickly over to play the slow-moving tune after each chord. His Sarabande for oboe (also arranged for clarinet) has a rich chordal basis in the accompaniment. How much they both owed to influences from Fauré is of interest. The Minuet from Ravel’s Sonatine will have been familiar to all, especially Grovlez, who premiered the work. From Fauré’s Requiem, In Paradisum and the Sanctus are good examples of this beautiful slow chordal music. Also, let’s not forget the slow chordal backbone of Debussy’s Clair de lune.

Satie was of course a radical in his aesthetics—intentionally challenging musical norms. He was present at the birth of Surrealism and leaned towards the avant-garde, embracing Dadaist absurdity later in life. Humour, irony, and wit abound in these offerings, alongside the reflective, delicate, and meditative times. Similarities in harmonic colour, form, and restraint are real, though Grovlez filtered them through a more polished, academic lens. Grovlez, more formal though modern, remained within the boundaries of French lyrical tradition.

Even if Satie and Grovlez never met, they absorbed elements from the same artistic air. Maybe they would pass in the street and greet one another. It is hard to imagine that they never did more than that, but there is no evidence of it at this time.

Both were rather busy and pre-occupied, perhaps. Maybe they were very much interested in some of the same musical ideas, but did not like one another:

Satie — too decadent.

Grovlez — too formal.\