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Because of traditional reflexes, the audience stopped to listen to the music but Satie and Milhaud kept saying « Whatever you do, don’t listen! »… And that’s the day what we now know as background music was born. As a true avant-garde artist and a serial jokester, with that experience, Satie wanted to do away with the idea of music happening as an organized and paid for event. During that intermission, music was therefore a non-event, a piece of furniture in the grand scheme of things, just like lighting or heating. What was seen as a joke then is our life now, and it even has a name, « elevator music »: shops, elevator, bars, restaurants… Every moment is a musical one and it’s barely noticeable because it should not be. It’s ironic that the Gymnopédies, written way before Satie’s concept, eventually became mainstream elevator music.

Gymnopédie No. 1 by Erik Satie, played by Jacques Février in 1966. Musicologist and philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch used to say that Satie was the composer of mornings, because there is something matutinal about his music… I might add that he was more precisely the composer of Sunday mornings, even though there is nothing religious about his compositions: but there is a serenity, a calmness, an emptiness that modernity associates with Sundays; so here is your dose of Sunday morning music. In fact, Satie was the inventor of something very modern that surrounds your everyday life… One day of 1920, Erik Satie organized something peculiar during the intermission of a concert by Max Jacobs. Indeed, it was the first outing of his concept of « musique d’ameublement » (furnishing music). The principle is simple: the public should walk around and discuss as if it were a normal intermession while musicians played music that should not be actively listened to…

This animation of Terrace of a Café at Night, is created by the artist @andrey.zakirzyanov. The original version of the artwork signed by Van Gogh is located at the @krollermullermuseum in the Netherlands.