With his Gymnopédies, Erik Satie left a lasting mark on our collective memory,
on the surface of a body of work that profoundly influenced twentieth-century
musical language, as the father of the minimalist avant-garde. Son of a Scottish
Protestant and a French Catholic shipbroker, Éric Alfred Leslie Satie was born
in Honfleur on May 17, 1866, and grew up between Normandy and Paris with his
father, who, after the death of his wife, remarried a piano teacher. Unmotivated
during his apprenticeship, the young Satie nonetheless entered the Paris
Conservatoire in 1879, from which he w...