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Pieces Froides

Composer: Satie, Erik

PROGRAM NOTES
Erik Satie’s piano work Pièces Froides (1897) is comprised of two three-movement pieces, the first of these being Airs à faire fuir (tunes to make you run away), the second, Danses de travers (slanted dances). Satie (1866-1925) often wrote music around a single idea yet, approaching it from several different ways—much like a visual artist studying a subject from many perspectives before painting. His music is at times, antithetical to, and perhaps reactionary to the soaring heights of the late nineteenth-century virtuoso performer, and the Wagnerian sense of “music-for-posterity” that the twentieth-century inherited.

Upon first hearing Danses de travers, I was immediately drawn to the work not only by its unfussiness and charm, but by it’s sweeping elongated phrases. The more I listened, the more I began to hear the expressive possibilities of a marimba adaptation. The arpeggiated triads in the left hand—1-5-3, 1-5-3, 1-5-3—seemed to establish the perfect foundation on which to overlay Satie’s crooked melodies in octaves. Satie in the first measure of the score, in a whimsically nonsensical way—perhaps with a touch of dadaism—instructs the performer, “En y regardant à deux fois”. This adaptation affords the modern marimbist the opportunity to “get a second look at” Satie’s music from another angle, and with a new perspective.
- Mark Berry