As the centenary of Erik Satie’s death on July 1^st approaches, I thought of a major work of his, first published 122 years ago (some parts of it are older still). This is his Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, for piano four hands, which I first heard when I was about 8 years old, thanks to my mother’s taste for French music, and have played ever since I was 15. The full title on the cover reads: Trois morceaux en forme de poire, à 4 mains, avec une Manière de commencement, une Prolongation du même, et un En plus, suivi d’une Redite, actually seven pieces in all.

The seven wildly mixing styles, shapes, and narrations, with comparable inconsistencies in harmony, are about as different from each other as could be, as though assembled from scraps off the cutting-room floor. An austere block-chord style with minimal rhythm is found side by side with ecclesiastical melody, salon-music sentimentalities, and lively music-hall styles close to American ragtime. Much of the writing for piano is technically clumsy, and even the notation is inexplicably crude; why, for instance, does Satie regularly write two half-notes tied together instead of a single whole note? We can get a hint of what Satie’s awkward self-consciousness was reaching for from Henri Büsser’s memoir of Ernest Guiraud’s class at the Conservatoire in 1890: “[Satie] seemed to be very little gifted and toiled enormously to produce a simple countersubject for a fugue, the sort of thing we were normally expected to produce on the spot.”

Some familiarity with Satie’s piano pieces from the late 1890s, including his Airs à faire fuir from the Pièces froides of 1897, shows that the Trois morceaux are assembled from a range of miscellaneous sketches. Next to the Gymnopédies of 1887-88, Satie’s best-known pieces for piano are the Trois gnossiennes from only a year or two later; but the Manière de commencement of the Trois morceaux is a different gnossienne, dating from 1890, when Satie composed some incidental music for a mystical play, Le fils des étoiles, and was identified as official composer to the Paris Rosicrucians. (The association was short-lived, and Satie decamped to found his own “Metropolitan Church of the Art of Jesus the Conductor”; it lasted only a few years, but yielded a very strange, beautiful Mass for the Poor.)

Satie’s own personality in these pieces is both thoroughly uneven and thoroughly original, and it’s understandable that it influenced Debussy’s harmonic evolution even from the start. Yet the influence was mutual. It was Debussy who discovered Satie playing the piano in the cabaret Chat noir, brought him to visit Guiraud’s class, inscribed a score of his own “Baudelaire Poems” ‘To Erik Satie, gentle medieval musician lost in our century,’ and later orchestrated two of the Gymnopédies. In 1903 the Trois morceaux were published, and the story went round that the whimsical title was an implied answer to Debussy’s unsubtle assertion that Satie’s music “lacked form.” During the next year Debussy was working on La mer, a masterpiece of autonomous tonal form — especially the first movement, “From dawn to noon on the sea,” about which Satie coyly remarked, “I especially liked the part around quarter to eleven.”

The first four bars of the Manière de commencement are very odd but determinedly serious, with strong impression of groping for coherence — much as though Satie had no idea of what he was doing harmonically. The third chord in m. 2, for instance, is identical to the second chord in m. 3 for no apparent reason (it comes from the Fils des étoiles music of 1890), and neither connects in what is already an unclear context.The whole passage serves as an intro, but just barely, and the rest of the Manière de commencement is a regular gnossienne like the others of that title, a minimal but readily comprehended form. It remains in a consistent E minor, until fading into F minor for just the last five bars. And along the way, there are short passages that can only be called flashes of inspiration — not mastery, but discovery; successful experimentation that helped to inspire Debussy, and to launch a new century of tonal harmony.

As Debussy was finishing La mer, Satie took his “form” remark as a hint, and decided, at age 39, to go back to school, enrolling in the Schola Cantorum for a class in counterpoint, from which he emerged with a diploma “très bien” three years later. Debussy advised against it: “At our age one doesn’t change one’s skin.” Satie didn’t change his skin, but did increase his skill.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert on the music of Alban Berg, Debussy, and other early 20th-century composers. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1967), he has published on many music subjects, and edited the revised fourth (1978) and fifth (1987) editions of Harmony by his teacher Walter Piston.