Erik Satie

Éric Alfred Leslie Satie was born on May 17, 1866 in Honfleur, on the Normandy coast of France, to a French father and a Scottish mother. His mother died when he was six and he was sent to live with paternal grandparents in Honfleur, returning to Paris in his early teens. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1879 but was dismissed as untalented, readmitted, and dismissed again, eventually leaving without a diploma.

He moved to the bohemian district of Montmartre in the late 1880s and supported himself as a cabaret pianist at the Chat Noir and the Auberge du Clou, where he met Claude Debussy in 1891. He composed the three Gymnopédies in 1888 and the Gnossiennes shortly after, slow and modally inflected piano pieces that quietly broke with late-Romantic harmony and became his calling cards. He also briefly led his own splinter church, the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor, of which he was the only member.

In 1898 he moved to the working-class suburb of Arcueil, where he lived alone in a single room for the rest of his life and walked into Paris each day. At nearly forty he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum under Vincent d'Indy and Albert Roussel to study counterpoint, graduating with honors in 1908.

His ballet Parade (1917), with a scenario by Jean Cocteau, sets by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine for the Ballets Russes, included a typewriter and a siren in the orchestra. He coined the term "musique d'ameublement" (furniture music), anticipating ambient music by half a century, and influenced the group of younger composers known as Les Six. He died of cirrhosis on July 1, 1925 in Paris.

The name Erik is a Scandinavian form of the Old Norse Eiríkr, from ei ("ever") and ríkr ("ruler"), meaning "eternal ruler." He used it as the French spelling of his masculine given name, having been baptized Éric Alfred Leslie.