## Satie: *Sonatine bureaucratique* (*Bureaucratic Sonatina*) >[!tip] Piece at a Glance: *Sonatine Bureaucratique* >- Composer: Eric Alfred Leslie **Satie** (1866-1925) >- Year Composed: July 1917, published September 1917 >- Period and Style: Neoclassical >- Tonality: A Major >- Length: $4$ minutes >- Movements: $3$ (*Allegro*, *Andante*, *Vivache* \[*sic*], all played *attacca*) Satie's oeuvre has always been in an uneasy relationship with what most consider to be "standard performance repertoire"; on one hand, his *Gymnopédies* (particularly, the first) are well-known to the general public, regardless of exposure to classical piano music. On the other hand, Satie wrote a plethora of odds and ends for the piano, most of which are relatively unknown, even to pianists with large repertoires. This observation is, of course, consistent with Satie's famous eccentricity and his seeming lack of desire to write large pieces for the piano. Furthermore, Satie's piano music is technically unimpressive, while being frustratingly difficult to navigate on account of the musical notation[^1] and the baffling French musical instructions and annotations scattered throughout the score. As a result, most pianists (rightly) stick to the more "serious" repertoire, with the likes of Debussy and Ravel being prevalent representatives of French piano music today. Perhaps, some of Satie's relative "obscurity" was intentional. Satie was a pioneer in both the Neoclassical and the Minimalist movements in music, and he is known for his term "furniture music," which he coined in 1917 to describe background music in living spaces. "Furniture music," or rather, the French *musique d’ameublement* (more accurately translated, *furnishing music*), was meant to be a means to an end, in setting an ambiance for a more important scene, rather than being the end itself. Though Satie only applied this designation to five pieces mainly written for chamber groups, much of this spirit may be felt in his piano works as well, even if figuratively: the music is not the end, but rather, the vehicle to direct the listener's attention towards something else. The *Sonatine bureaucratique* is one of these semi-obscure[^2] piano works. Satie wrote this piano pastiche in 1917, with this being his very last humorous piano piece: disaster would befall Satie after the *Sonatine* is published. Satie's ballet *Parade* was mocked by his closest friend, Claude Debussy (1862-1918), who died in the next year from cancer. Satie, in bitterness, did not attend Debussy's funeral, yet the loss of a former close friend was still difficult to process for him. Finally, the dedicatee of the *Sonatine,* the pianist Juliette Meerovitch, died in 1920 at the age of $24$, from an unknown illness. Satie's next output for the piano would be his *Nocturnes* (1919), which are somber pieces written after re-emerging as an artist after a depressed 1918. With all this being said, Satie wrote the *Sonatine bureaucratique* unbeknownst to what was to happen to him in the coming years, and therefore, this work is *a priori* a humorous jab at the classical sonata form. Satie modeled the *Sonatine* after Muzio Clementi's famous Sonatina in C Major (Op. 36, No. 1), which is a rite of passage for any piano student under the age of ten. Indeed, the *Sonatine* copies the rhythmic motifs of the Clementi piece, but the harmonies are "Frenchified" in Satie's own voice. As in usual Satie fashion, he subverts the model he uses by purposefully inserting original material strategically in what would otherwise be a recounting of a transposed version of an overplayed piece. However, the "bureaucratic" nature of the *Sonatine* does not appear until one examines the text that comes with the work, written in French, and translated into (faulty) English in the first edition. Satie writes a story above the musical text of the piece, and this story connects the three movements into one cohesive work. However, the story is not very good, and this is intentional: Satie describes the (boring!) life of an underpaid civil servant who likes a cute girl at work and is thinking about moving to a new apartment, provided that he gets a raise. It is more akin to a description of a man, probably in his thirties, who has the exact same routine every day, and therefore, the text of the *Sonatine* is *existential* (if not absurd and completely meaningless) if anything. This is in standard Satie fashion: his descriptions of his music are purposefully baffling, ridiculous, and often insignificant. However, these are the elements that give Satie (and in particular, his *Sonatine*) his weird charm: there is no attempt to be significant, and Satie makes that clear in his music. #satie [^1]: See, for example, the score of *Vexations,* or in general, Satie's refusal to use barlines in many of his works. [^2]: Satie's early biographers tended to ignore the *Sonatine bureaucratique* or dismissed it as unimpressive. Today, it is among the most performed of Satie's works, but considering that Satie's works are not performed all that often today (other than the *Gymnopédies* and the *Gnossiennes*), this is not saying much.