When Erik Satie died on July 1, 1925, his journey was in many ways just beginning. Considered a curiosity in his lifetime (though one not without his admirerers and influence), his posthumous life would find his influence only continuing to grow until he would come to be seen by our time as the Father of the Avant Garde in music. In honor of Satie on the 102nd anniversary of his passing, we'll hear his final completed work, the ballet Relâche. Premiered in 1924 by the Paris-based Swedish dance ensemble, "Ballets suédois,"—who helped reinvent post-World War I European dance by combining dance, drama, painting, poetry, and music with acrobatics, circus, film, and pantomime," this seminal Dadaist event—which bought together asuch avant garde artists poet and painter Francis Picabia and film maker Rene Clair, along with composer Erik Satie—was a great note on which to depart, and found the composer, for whom humor was central, getting the last laugh. He had, after all, titled the ballet Relâche—the French used on posters and marquee to indicate that a show is canceled, or the theater is closed—which, needless to say, caused considerable confusion at the work's scheduled premiere in 1924. (News of the play's cancellation had been greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase a famous line of Mark Twain.) We'll hear that and much more this afternoon on Blue Lake Public Radio.
You can hear Foley Schuler's musical selections—and stories behind the music—every weekday from 1 until 4 on Blue Lake Public Radio.
