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| Plaque above the entrance in Rue Cortot Nr. 6, in Montmartre |
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| Satie "au coin de son froid" in his room in the Rue Cortot, Montmartre. Oil painting by Santiago Rusiñol, 1890. |
There is also a marvellous moment in Erik Satie’s Pieces Froides (Cold Pieces): “merveilleusement”, it says in French.
Satie wrote his Cold Pieces in 1897 when he was living in a very small, unheated room in Montmartre. He called it the cupboard. The room was so cold that he had to sleep with all his clothes on top of him. Later, in the 1980s, the Satie scholar Ornella Volta created a miniature museum in that room: Musée-Placard d'Erik Satie, the Cupboard Museum of Erik Satie.
In Italian class I made a friend, Carla. On Sundays, Carla works at the Italian bakery Sironi - I go by and order a caffe nero. Carla works also as a psychologist - I talk with her about my interest in art and nonsense. She laughs. Her work is the opposite: she tries to restore people’s feeling of “sense” in life.
In Italian the word for nonsense is…. la sciocchezza
Or silly: sciocche
What helps to create sense in life?
Routine, Carla says.
Also artists have a strict routine.
This is an excerpt from Satie’s autobiography:
"An artist must regulate his life.
This is the precise timetable of my daily acts.
I rise: at 07.18; inspired: from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14."
I enjoy reading about other people’s schedules. I think it’s comforting.
Or take the writer Roland Barthes; in his autobiography Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, he reveals his “Emploi du temps - Use of time”
“During vacation I get up at seven, go downstairs, and open the house, make myself some tea, break up some bread for the birds waiting in the garden, wash, dusk my desk, empty its ashtrays, cut a rose, listen to the seven-thirty news. At eight, my mother comes downstairs too; I take breakfast with her: two soft-boiled eggs, a slice of toast and black coffee, no sugar; at eight-fifteen, I go for the paper in the village; I say to Mmmm C: A lovely day, overcast, etc.; and then I begin working.”
Barthes also structured his work room: he had a desk for writing, a desk for painting, and a corner for the piano.
Like me, RB was an amateur piano player:
The amateur is, according to Barthes, not a lesser pianist but a pianist who plays differently. Amateurs are clumsy players: they can not play anything without making mistakes because they reject training. They want the immediate pleasure of playing.
Playing piano replaced sport for Barthes, he said so in an interview: “From the moment you play music yourself, it is the muscular body that intervenes and that is very important. It sets in motion and I would say almost in turmoil, in emotion, deep areas of the body, almost nervous or vegetative areas, but which pass through the skin, through the muscle, through the contact of the hand with the keyboard, and phenomena of this kind.”
Talking sport: In 1898 Satie moved to Arceuil and walked every day about 5km to Paris to meet up with his friends. Satie composed mostly at night walking back home, stopping beneath each street lamp to write down the ideas that came to him, in pencil, in the little folded notebooks he carried in his overcoat pocket.
Guido Giannuzzi describes Satie’s walking in his book Gli ombrelli di Satie: “Ad Arceuil, I suoi vicini non faticarono a notare da subito questo signore che camminava con piccoli e lenti passi, aggiustandosi in continuazione il pince-nez, accompagnato sempre dall’ombrello appeso al braccio.”
One set of Satie’s Cold Pieces are called Crooked Dances and these are the ones I have played here in the background.
Satie wrote:
"I used a kaleidophone-recorder to write my Cold Pieces. It took seven minutes. I called my servant to have him hear them."