for soprano, flute, violin, vibraphone, celeste, and harp (1975)
performed by the Real Time ensemble.
Written in May of 1975 when I was 19, Satie is my Opus 1, the earliest piece of mine I would now consent to inflinct on an audience. It was written for my then-girlfriend, the singer Paulette Wallendorf, on a wave of Satie worship, soon after my discovery of minimalism, and also with a strong dash of John Cage in the random collisions of its contrapuntal lines. Originally "Untitled," it was the piece I took with me to the first June in Buffalo symposium a month later, where Cage looked at it and said, "It makes me want to hear it." Morton Feldman persuaded me to change its orchestration (from piano and vibraphone to harp and celesta), and said, "It looks like you want to be writing Steve Reich's music." (The irony of this comment, I found out years later, was that only shortly before, Feldman had played his own recent music for his student Peter Gena - later my composition teacher - and asked him, "Do you think it sounds too much like Steve Reich?") The text of the piece is several quotations from Satie, and the eleven-minute piece contains not a sharp or a flat. To this day, Satie remains one of my very favorite composers, along with Charles Ives and Ferruccio Busoni - one of music's incontrovertible saints. - www.kylegann.com
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Kyle Eugene Gann (born November 21, 1955): Composer, musicologist, writer, educator
