Simon Crameri: Zur Formgestaltung bei Erik Satie am Beispiel seiner Danses Gothiques

Taking Erik Satie’s Danses Gothiques (1893) as an example, this article illustrates to what extent his compositional forms were shaped by non-musical elements. If Satie’s compositions are construed exclusively as pieces of music, then most of them appear to be arbitrarily arranged sequences of aural configurations. A completely different perspective toward the eccentric formal conception of these works arises, however, once their multimedia character is taken into account. In many of Satie’s instrumental compositions, the succession of events is co-determined by texts (unconventional expression marks, short stories, or descriptions); in other compositions, conversely, visual components play a central role, for example, when Satie lays out the staves of notes like graphic or calligraphic drawings. In the case of Danses Gothiques, the autograph is indispensable for an accurate analysis (F-Pn, MS. 10048), since the first posthumous edition of the work (1929) totally ignores Satie’s special spatial arrangement of the score.

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