Erik Satie

From his emergence as the Bohemian 'gymnopediste' of fin-de-siecle Montmartre to his encounters with the Dada movement after World War I, composer Erik Satie famously flaunted convention.

His reputation as an avant-garde provocateur, however, has left him relegated to the status of 'precursor' in a musical landscape ruled by Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky; in this standard interpretation, his influence trumped his innovations.

In this new biography, Mary E. Davis reveals this to be an incomplete view: Satie's modernist aesthetic, she demonstrates, was born of the real-world contradictions that informed his life.

A cabaret performer and the composer of hit songs, as well as a graduate of the conservative Schola Cantorum, he proposed a new music based on the consistent contact of everyday elements and rarefied genres and forms.

A whimsical calligrapher and irreverent essayist, he redrew the boundaries of art, devising new expressive modes based on the intersection of words, visual art, and music.Not simply a darling of the avant-garde, he was embraced by elite society; his interactions with the most stylish Parisians brought him into the sphere of high fashion and significantly shaped his aesthetic views, prompting him to develop a modernist music that was relevant, witty, and pleasurable.

This new style was Neoclassicism, and contrary to conventional views, Satie rather than Stravinsky was its first significant proponent.

Satie's offbeat sartorial sensibilities are legendary: he adopted uniforms that ranged from priestly cassocks to bourgeois suits, and through the 1890s wore one of the seven identical velvet suits he bought with a small inheritance, thus earning the nickname 'The Velvet Gentleman'.

Exploring Satie's work through the lens of fashion, this biography reveals the ways in which the composer harnessed the power of image to reinforce and articulate his artistic stance at key moments in his career, and situates Satie in the context of nascent celebrity culture.More importantly, it illuminates the profound aesthetic links between couture and culture, demonstrating the importance of fashion to the rise of musical modernism and properly positioning Satie in the center, rather than at the margins, of this major shift.