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Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and His World. By Caroline Potter. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2016. [xxxiii, 269 p. ISBN 9781783270835 (hardback), $39.95; ISBN 9781782046493 (e-book), $34.99.] Music examples, illustrations, personalia, chronology, works list, bibliography, index, online supplemental recordings.
Erik Satie's relationship with the world, especially with the arts, was decidedly idiosyncratic. His strange clothing choices, odd performance directions, and repetitive compositions are well known and heavily described in the literature (for example, Mary E. Davis, Erik Satie, Critical Lives [London: Reaktion Books, 2007] and Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer, Music in the Twentieth Century [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990]). Caroline Potter's newest book on Satie celebrates these idiosyncrasies without fetishizing them. Instead, she emphasizes the need to contextualize Satie as an "interart" creator at the forefront of French modernism. Potter's book, already favorably reviewed elsewhere, won "Classical Music Book of the Year" for 2016 from the Sunday Times.
Potter's concise volume continues work begun in her edited collection on the composer (Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature, Music and Literature [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013]), which explored Satie's interdisciplinary writing, performance art, and composition. Her latest monograph presents several fresh insights and weaves together extant literature with archival discoveries and sketch studies. At times, the author is so humble about her achievements that a reader might be unimpressed, not realizing that Potter makes important new contributions to the field partly by exploring several lesser-known works. As a supplement to the book, Potter arranged for students at London's Royal College of Music to record five of Satie's previously unrecorded pieces-all examples of his musique d'ameublement (furniture music)-and posted them to a YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com / channel/UCGfOdIdyBcPCtFlg0UXF0 Lw [accessed 12 February 2018]). Un - fortunately, on its Web page for the book, the publisher fails to provide a link to the channel and mentions its location only at the end of the preface and in the acknowledgements. These recordings are an incredibly important service to the field, and they help illustrate several of Potter's most persuasive arguments. The channel ought to be more prominently advertised and easier to access.
Rather like Satie's music, Potter's book is short and deceptively simple, circling around a theme that, with closer examination, is quite astute. Her overarching goal is...