research
The "reading room" of Erik Satie's Crystal Ball is divided into several areas covering the main musical movements which developed during the fifty years after Erik Satie's death (1925 - 1975). Use the links below to browse the currently available topics (unlinked headings denote forthcoming research):
Intoductory thoughts & comments
Impressionism
Futurism (Bruitism)
Functional music (Gebrauchsmusik)
Serialism
sidelines
November 2006: Currently I'm working on a sideline to this research, looking at Satie and Dadaism, exploring the parallels between the development of Dada as a reaction to war and suffering, and its techniques (developed mostly in the visual and literary arts) and how these related to Satie's work. We know that he was personally involved, at least to a limited extent, with Dadaists in Paris in the later years of his life - Relâche was a Dadaist ballet and its cinematic Entr'acte was a marvellous example of Dada film - but it seems to me that, like the musical movements listed here, he also used techniques in his earlier, pre-war work which came to have parallels in techniques used by Dada visual artists - for example, collage and photomontage.
I am hoping to be able to publish some of my conclusions here by the end of 2007.
