Satie's 'Entr'Acte' - A Model of Film Music

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Satie's "Entr'acte:" A Model of Film Music Author(s): Douglas W. Gallez and Satie Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 36-50Published by: on behalf of the University of Texas Press Society for Cinema & Media StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225448Accessed: 21-10-2015 01:44 UTC

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Satie's Entr'acte. A Model of Film Music

Douglas W. Gallez

To be interested in Satie one must be disinterested to begin with, accept that a sound is a sound and a man is a man, give up illusions about ideas of order, expressions of sentiment, and all the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap.

-John Cagel

No consideration of film music can afford to overlook the unique con- tribution of that eccentric genius of the twenties, Erik Satie. Simple, flow-

ing, sometimes ingratiating, his music lends itself well to film, particularly to collage films in experimental cinema.2 Never has the cinematic affinity of Satie's music been better demonstrated than in the score he wrote to

accompany Rene Clair's film interlude for Francis Picabia's Dadaist ballet, Reldche (1924).3 It is an inventive score without peer, at once durable and distinguished, says Virgil Thomson. Its excellence "is due to Satie's

having understood correctly the limitations and possibilities of a photo- graphic narrative as subject matter for music."4 Satie's score provides a useful model for today's composers and film makers, especially because it anticipated over 50 years ago some of the structural concepts now in vogue in the arts.5

1 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, ]966), p. 82.

2 Bruce Baillie, "inspired by a lesson from Satie," affectionately included a snippet or two of a Satie work in the soundtrack of his Castro Street (1966)-see David Curtis, Experimental Cinema (New York: Dell, 1971), p. 120. Film maker Harold Becker edited his Eugene Atget (1963) in loving synchronization with orchestrated versions of Satie's Trois Gymnopedies. The Gymnopedies have been used and imitated in television commercials, even in one for a feminine deodorant. Satie might not have disap- proved, what with his insistence on musique d'ameublement. In a prospectus sent to Jean Cocteau he wrote: "We want to establish a music designed to satisfy 'useful' needs. Art has no part in such needs. Furniture music creates a vibration; it has no other goal." -cited in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 169.

3 Satie's work is variously called "Entr'acte cinematographique," "Entr'acte symphonique," or "Cinema"-see Shattuck, p. 170. The two piano versions of the score are entitled "Cinema."

4 Virgil Thomson, Music Right and Left (New York: Holt, 1951), pp. 98-99 passim. 5 A misconception was published some years ago that Satie's music had been lost.



Cinema Journal / 37

Musique d'ameublement

Following a notion of Matisse's, Satie maintained that music, like wall-

paper, could be decorative without attracting attention. Intended to be heard but not listened to, such music accorded with Satie's philosophy, L'Esprit Nouveau. The New Spirit was a philosophy which, while empha- sizing humility and renunciation, minimized musical emotion and activity in favor of clarity and directness.7 Superficial and utilitarian, this so-called musique d'ameublement (furniture music) had little intrinsic value, but Satie believed that music derived meaning from its utility-an idea, says

Cage, that agrees with Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy.8 It is said that Satie "worked scrupulously over a few pieces [mobiliers

musicaux] and humbled his art in a manner that was half penance, half gag."9 Collaborating with others, he mounted a performance of the musique d'ameublement at the Galerie Barbazange in Paris in March, 1920. This initial experiment in self-effacement failed, because those attending listened to the music despite Satie's pleas that they should ignore it.10 Nevertheless, even if Satie intended only to pull the legs of the musical public and the critics, the concept of musique d'ameublement was prophetic. By daring to advance furniture music Satie became the "Father of Muzak."ll He soon used his idea most successfully in the score for Entr'acte.

This simply is not true; various versions are available from Editions Salabert. They were used during the research for this monograph. Also, the music has been recorded; see Candide Records 31018, compatible stereo, "Entr'acte symphonique du ballet 'Re- lache,'" performed by the ensemble Die Reihe, conducted by Friedrich Cerha. Cf. David Curtis, note, p. 23: "Satie's music no longer survives and there is an alternative version [of Entr'acte] suggesting that Picabia had hoped to use the 'interval murmur of the theatre audience as a background noise for this [silent] film, but they all fell silent, as though the sight of [Clair's] extraordinary cortege had taken their breath away. Picabia, enraged, shouted at the audience, "Talk, can't you, talk!" Nobody did.' Hans Richter Dada, Art and Anti-Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1965." Perhaps the misconception of the "lost" music is Richter's.

6 Matisse had written, "What I dream of is an art without any disquieting or pre- occupying subject, . . . something analogous to a good armchair."-cited in Shattuck, p. 169. Stravinsky later drew upon the wallpaper analogy to deplore the value of film music: "Film music? It's wallpaper!"

7 Cage, loc. cit. On p. 76, Cage quotes Satie: "There'll probably be some music, but we'll manage to find a quiet corner where we can talk." This remark, epitomizing Satie's attitude toward music in his last years, seems to refer to musique d'ameublemenlt. Con- ceivably the ironic allusion to music in a public place-music which Satie and his com- panion could ignore and which reflected Satie's attitude of resignation-derived from his hard experience as a Montmartre cabaret pianist, when as many patrons ignored his music as paid it heed.

8 Cage in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 191. 9 Shattuck, p. 169. 10 Darius Milhaud, Notes sans nmusique (Paris: Rene Julliard, 1949), p. 137. 11 An apt sobriquet by student Tom Roth, San Francisco State University, Novem-

ber, 1969. See also Shattuck, p. 169: "Since that day [at the Galerie Barbazange] juke- boxes, radios, television, music while you work, canned music, audiotherapy-a whole



38 / Cinema Journal

Most students of film are familiar with Clair's witty excursion into the world of Dada, which Arthur Knight succinctly described in The Liveliest Art:

. . . amidst the imagery of Paris in miniature and a game of chess played on a rooftop ledge, Borlin [premier danseur of the Ballet Suedois] is killed by a shot aimed at an amusement park target. The funeral begins with the hearse drawn by a camel, the mourners setting out in majestic slow motion after it. But somehow the hearse breaks loose from its moorings, and soon the entire procession is racing in hot pursuit through the streets of Paris. The leaves blur overhead. Clair cuts in a ride on a roller coaster to heighten the sense of speed, or mounts his camera on the front of a car as it races down a curving mountain road. Suddenly the hearse stops, the coffin falls out, and up pops Borlin smiling and unharmed . . .12

That is the essence of the action depicted on the screen. To arrive at a

judgment of Satie's musico-cinematic achievement, it is important to exam- ine not only the film content, but also Satie's working notes in the form of a cue sheet, the degree of precision in synchronization of the music with the film, and the music itself.

Satie's Cue Sheet Satie's plan for "Cinema" is an early example of a film music cue sheet.

(See Figure 1.) 13 Commencing with the title, Satie sketches the measures and repetitions of ideas, the key changes and rehearsal cues, and occasionally indicates the screen action: "Cheminees, ballons qui explosent" (Chim- neys, exploding balloons); "Gants de boxe & allumettes" (Boxing gloves and matches); etc. His layout ends just before the appearance of the ballerina.14

race of creatures-have sprung into existence to fill the aural background of our lives the way interior decoration fills the visual background." Paul Hindemith, in A Com- poser's World: Horizons and Limitations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 211-213, brilliantly excoriates environmental music, a "relentlessly running music faucet."

12 Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art (New York: The New American Library, 1959), p. 102.

13 Pierre-Daniel Templier, Erik Satie, trans. Elena L. French and David S. French (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1969), plate 83 [no pagination].

14 This is apparently at Scene 109 in the description of the action provided in Rene Clair, A Nous la Liberte and Entr'acte, trans. Richard Jacques and Nicola Hayden (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. 125. A curious discrepancy can be seen between the piano versions of "Cinema" and Satie's orchestral score and cue sheet. The piano scores indicate "ballons sur les toits," but the orchestral score and cue sheet show "bateaux sur les toits." Study of the film and published script indicates that a paper boat floats through the air superimposed over rooftops. Satie's note, therefore, is the accurate description of the action. See scenes 94-107 in Clair, pp. 124-125.



Cinema Journal / 39

Figure 1. Satie's Cue Sheet

Cinema

1 -- Titre [Title]

2 -|f i 111 4 p

4 - 18 - |I? 5 --|[ ?8 11 36

C 6 -- | 341 iG

7 --I1 ? 8 :1 16

9_-- IP, ^IIl . || 1

10 -- 4iL2 I

11- j 11 &5I6

12 8^ Av v ||^

A "Relache"

'heminees, ballons qui explosent Chimneys, exploding balloons]

l 20

[Part I]

,ants de boxe & allumettes [Box- dg gloves and matches]

[Part II]

13 -- 1:

14 -- lt

16 L

48 :ii=_

~4^2 (=

Prises d'air, jeu d'echecs et bateaux sur les toits (60) [High angle shots, chess game and boats over roof-

tops]

4

[Part III] 15 - _ :.

16 --|1i 0 11

17 -- | 2



40 / Cinema Journal

Unfortunately, we do not have easy access to the rest of Satie's working notes, if indeed they survive.15 Perhaps it would be useful to compare his complete plan with the musical score, but it seems likely that such examination would merely confirm that Satie proceeded consistently throughout his notes. We would probably continue to see signs of haste-corrections and deletions, unlike much of his elegant calligraphy-combined with the workmanlike shorthand of the practical composer. Let it suffice, then, to describe Satie's musical shorthand for Sheet A (Fig. 1), and assume that his method was consistent throughout the plan.

The cue sheet is primitive in terms of today's sophisticated kind pre- pared by music cutters, but it was quite adequate for Satie. The sheet is divided into three parts: numbers 1-6 comprise Part I; numbers 7-12, Part II; numbers 13-17, Part III. We can tell where Satie made divisions, for he began a fresh cumulative count of elapsed bars at numbers 7 and 13. The following key-not Satie's-helps us understand his shorthand:

Key

4 Plain numerals indicate the number of bars of music within a secti;n of a part, with the exception of those numerals followed by a dash.

20 Underlined numerals indicate the number of bars elapsed from the beginning of the parts.

O Circled numerals indicate rehearsal cues for the orchestra.

|: :I The musical symbol for a repetition of whatever it surrounds.

All other symbols and combinations of numerals are indicators of initial musical key, key changes, and time signatures.

Conforming Music and Film To determine the correspondences between Satie's music and Clair's

film challenges the researcher. The problem has to do with discrepancies in lengths and running times reported for the film, compounded by other data about the score and a recording of it.

15 The cited cue sheet was in the possession of Darius Milhaud, one of Satie's dis- ciples. Possibly some or all of the other plans for the Entr'acte music survive and are now held by Milhaud's widow.



Cinema Journal / 41

Sadoul reported the approximate footage of Entr'acte to be 1,398 feet.16 At 20 frames per second average projection speed (estimated) the running time would be about 1842 minutes. The publisher of the score lists a duration of 18 minutes,17 and a recorded performance of it lasts 17,2 minutes.18 Yet a script taken from the screen19 reports a running time of 22 minutes, which agrees with the performance time specified in Satie's orchestral score. This last duration seems most likely, and the projection speed which would account for it is within the silent range of 16 to 18 frames per second.

Examination of the piano reduction of Satie's score reveals no precise indication of tempos. At the outset Satie specifies "Pas trop vite" (not too fast); for the funeral march he indicates "plus lent" (slower); for the chase he provides no sign of accelerating tempo, but afterward he directs "lent" (slow); finally, at the very end, "Large et lourd en retenant" (broad and heavy while holding back). Although these occasional directions derived from the orchestral score do not specify the proper tempo for synchronization, other directions in the same score clearly show that Satie relied on the orchestra conductor, Roger Desormiere, to adjust tempo and to repeat segments as needed to synchronize the music and screen action.20 The orchestral score, autographed November, 1924, contains metronome mark- ings apparently supplied by one or more conductors, but the composer did not specify them.2l The range of tempos is generally from very slow

16 Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films, trans. ed., and updated by Peter Morris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 103.

17 Erik Satie, Cinema: Entr'acte symphonique de "Reldche," reduction pour piano 2 mains (Paris: Editions Salabert, 1972), following p. 14.

18 The Cerha recording referred to in note 5 above. Comparison of this performance with the piano scores for Entr'acte indicate that Cerha included many repetitions of Satie's building-block musical elements and made two deletions. Study of the orchestral score reveals that not all of these repetitions conform with Satie's specifications. Because the score is highly mechanistic-that is, extremely repetitious without variation -it is no wonder that the recorded version is about 20 per cent shorter than the film accompaniment. Thus the problem of rationalizing conformance of music and picture is further confused.

19 Clair, p. 114. 20 This can be considered an orchestral equivalent of piano vamping until the artist

being accompanied is ready to begin. In the sequence immediately preceding the funeral procession, Satie's score indicates "faire cette reprise jusqu'a ce que Picabia ait tue Borlin. Arreter-puis enchainer" (make this repetition until Picabia has killed Borlin. Stop-then proceed). Again, at the end of the chase before the coffin falls from the hearse and Borlin emerges, Satie's score states "faire cette reprise X fois, jusqu'a la chulte du cercueil" (make this repetition X times, until the coffin falls). Finally, just before the end of the film, Satie specifies in his score "faire cette reprise jusqu'a ce que Borlin rentre dans l'ecran. Arreter, puis enchainer-" (make this repetition until Borlin returns to the screen. Stop, then proceed-).

21 Satie's music for the complete ballet Reldche, excluding "Cinema," contains a range of metronome indications, implying that the composer knew specifically what tempos were required for the dancers. In contrast, the tempo for the earlier Satie ballet, Parade, is virtually unvaried, about M.M. J = 72 (an andante, or "walking" tempo).



42 / Cinema Journal

(M. M. J-46 or J-92) for the slow-motion procession (cortege au ralenti), through M. M.)= 92 for the ballerina and funeral march sequences, to a quick-step march tempo (M. M.J= 120) for the opening and closing sequences.

The author regrets not having had access to the sound version of Entr'acte, released in 1968, in which the Satie score was synchronized with the images. Since Henri Sauguet, a Satie disciple, conducted the orchestra for this version,22 and the film running time conforms with the performance time indicated in the Satie score (22 min.), this version probably provides de- finitive answers to questions of tempo and synchronization. Possibly the conductors' annotations to the orchestral score examined were made by Sauguet and Cerha (they were in French and German), but probably not by Desormiere. (Some annotations in the score were in English.)

The Music Satie told Clair that he had written "pornographic" music for Entr'acte,

although not sufficiently so as to make "a lobster blush." In his last years, the "old master of young music" hadn't lost his mordant wit.23 Satie's music isn't pornographic, of course, nor is it embarrassing enough to make any creature blush. As Shattuck points out,

The construction of the music could not be more primitive. Satie merely uses eight measures, as the unit that most closely matches the average length of a single shot in the film. He fills each of these units with one stereotyped phrase repeated eight times. Between the units he inserts a double line, a new signature, and frequently a change in tempo. The transitions are as abrupt and arbitrary as the cuts in the film. Typical measures lend them- selves to infinite repetition and do not establish any strong tonal feeling.24

Delightfully vulgar and simple, the score is ruthlessly mechanical, characterized by endless repetitions without variation. This music should not be listened to for its own sake, for stripped from the film, it becomes

tediously obnoxious. But with Clair's silly, light-hearted pictures, Satie's music works hand in glove; it is just right. What is banal and grotesque when heard alone somehow is apropos when experienced with the visuals. It subtly mocks the funeral procession and the mourners running in slow motion; in the chase of the hearse, the score vigorously propels the action.

The music is objective, totally lacking in ostentation, and truly cinematic because it involves short fragments of music bound together by an

The different sections of the scores are notated to be more, or less active, working within the steady overall tempo. The mechanical pulse (Takt) is like that generated by the clicktrack in modern film scoring.

22 Clair, p. 114 . 23 Clair, pp. 109-110 passim. 24 Shattuck, pp. 170-171.



Cinema Journal / 43

underlying, insistent rhythm. Various eight-bar phrases of stereotyped me- lodic fragments and harmonic progressions accompany the screen action. Because Entr'acte is essentially a collage of absurd, playful images mounted in rapid succession, Satie's music is equally fragmentary. Clearly, Satie did not slavishly adhere to the illogical visual content of Clair's collage; he wisely concerned himself with chan,ges of rhythm and tempno. As Mellers observed,

Satie realized that m0ontage . . . makes the film's rhythm, which the rhythm of the music must reveal. In so far as the music is a commentary on the action and the transitory visual images, it must depend on brief snippets rather than on sustained passages developed melodically and harmonically. These snippets must usually succeed one another without modulation, which would be disturbing to continuity; but although they cannot be formalized in any of the orthodox musical structures, they can be organized in recur- rent patterns by the use of rhythmic ostinati and mechanical percussion.25

Since Satie rarely illustrated, concentrating instead on the film's dynamism, the music was self-effacing, a quality we know to be particularly in accord with the composer's musical philosophy. The observation that Satie's musical snippets "cannot be formalized in any of the orthodox musical structures" perhaps is valid, depending on Mellers's definition of "orthodox." Entr'acte's musical structure is a rondo-a common musical form-which features the ideas given in Figure 2. The three examples are featured in the score, with greatest prominence given to Example 1. It appears eight times in the composition. Some two dozen other musical fragments are in- terpolated between the three cited examples. Example 1 irregularly recurs; its several reappearances are unpredictable. In sum, the Entr'acte music can well be considered an unorthodox rondo, but not a classical one.

Rhythms, Meters, and Phrasing Satie's permutating rhythms and shifting meters are more subtle and

intricate than his melodies and harmonies. Figures 3 and 4 chart these per- mutations, based on scansion of Cinema. As can be seen, most of the music is in duple meter (2, ,6); some parts are in triple meter (i); the funeral march and a brief section following it are in quadruple meter (C).

Most of the cellular parts of the composition are eight measures long. Occasionally a four-measure part occurs-for example, the last four bars of the composition, which are in i meter (Fig. 4 [g]). In this instance, how- ever, the tempo is so slow that the time length approximates that of a faster eight-measure part. Each of the four measures of -- is so accented that the

25 W[ilfrid] H. M[ellers], "Film Music: The Musical Problem," in Eric Blom, ed., Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed. (New York: St. Martin's, 1954), vol. 3, p. 103.



44 / Cinema Journal

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<< LLJ o

e

"I

rEi 0

C4 CIA

es

C-)

oLL

U-

<i?

V4

111



Cinema Journal / 45

Figure 3. Rhythms and Meters in Cinema

Simple Duple Meter

(a) Ij I

(b) j J I

(C) v T y0^J

W I

(g) l I II

(h) jnJ jI (j' iJTIssm (k) J l

(1) J J- l

'6 1i

J\ J ,1

- .n.ll (f) . I ... . i

^ I ri 0 i I 111,

I b1 1Al

Combinations (Juxtaposed and Simultaneous)

(m) ,2 n j I n

(n) J I 3

(o,) n i .- .r. ........

(p)

(q) Wn - \ 1 1

(1)\ I J |? < 1 j (r) P (r) 1I, I

- IL j

j 3 $

,I j; ?j j j -- --I I --! ' " l

-

19 - m - ^-I

, I.--3 ,

Io I 0

ii o 0 1A

(iz...n 11



46 / Cinema Journal

Figure 4. Rhythms and Meters in Cinema

Transition

- Ir3 - 3L

Simple Triple Meter

o41 dJ I J (c m41 Wi o (C

t~~~ I

I

I 1 I I n d-* V _- - II

Simple Duple Meter

A . I ..

,^ . . i i . . , ! v,

Simple Quadruple Meter

C .^. J I U. J H c A,

I <J il J I5

(a)

(b)

(c)

(e)

(f) to

(1)

(g) (2)

(h)

(i)

1 E

I



Cinema Journal / 47

effect as heard is three pulses achieved twice within a nominal framework of two. The passage could have been notated in simple triple meter (i)- as in Fig. 4 (g) (2)-with the tempo of the previous section being maintained.

A more curious exception to Satie's eight-measure groups is the 21-measure declamatory, chorale-like section (Fig. 3 [r]). Although notated in duple meter ()), the accentuation suggests triple meter (-, giving an ambivalence to the rhythmic pulse. This part comprises three identical seven-measure phrases, each consisting of three measures plus four measures (as shown in the example). In structural terms, the phrasing is re- lated to the shifting rhythmic effect commented upon in the following paragraph.

A clever rhythmic transition occurs just before the film sequence in which the ballerina appears (Fig. 4 [a]). The duple meter can be considered as alternately divided into duplets and triplets, pointing backward to the meter that persisted until this moment of transition (Fig. 3 [o]), and forward to the triple meter accompanying the dancer (Fig. 4 [b]).

In this composition, Satie did not always use such a device; more com- monly he simply juxtaposed one section against another, shifting directly from one meter to another. For example, no ambivalent combination of rhythms serves as transition between the end of the chase and the reap- pearance of Borlin. The duple meter of the chase (Fig. 3 [q]) is immediately followed by the triple meter accompanying the toppling of the coffin from the hearse (Fig. 4[e]).

Notable also are certain curious examples of phrasing. The phrases which introduce the funeral march are in three, although the meter is quadruple. Again, some of the cadences in the composition are truncated. In- stead of being balanced with the preceding musical phrases, the com- pressed cadences abruptly terminate the sections so that the next part can begin without disturbing the score's dynamic impulse.

Orchestration Satie orchestrated his musical cliches in his Montmartre music-hall style

-trumpet solos over strings, heavy-handed bass line, crude use of cymbal and gong, ricky-ticky wood block. The simple instrumentation calls for a modest orchestra consisting of one flute, one oboe, one clarinet, one bas- soon, two horns, two trumpets, one trombone, percussion (two players, featuring side drum [tarolle], bass drum, cymbals, gong, triangle, tambou- rine, and wood block [claquette]), and the usual strings (violins, violas, cellos, and basses). Instruments are traditionally used, with deference to their normal capabilities, permitting easy performance. No unusual effects are prescribed; no notable combinations of instruments are specified to produce strange sonorities. If there is anything unusual about Satie's orchestration, it is the featuring of percussion instruments in brief solos with exaggeration of dynamics, as one would hear in cabaret perform- ances.



48 / Cinema Journal

Satie's Achievement26 So much for the music resulting from Satie's one-time enthusiastic em-

brace of cinema. What can be said of Satie and film in a broader perspective? A minor composer of limited gifts, an ascetic who hated pretense and sentiment, Satie did not value greatness.27 Thumbing his nose at the gross- ness of post-romanticism, he helped create the sane simplicity of neo- classicism. The pity is that, beyond a small circle of sympathetic composers, film musicians of his time ignored or were ignorant of his achievement in Entr'acte and of his musical philosophy. Perhaps most affected were Henri Sauguet, Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud, and Maurice Jaubert; and Americans influenced by the French school such as Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, and George Antheil.28

Satie's detractors regard most of his music as sterile. True, in eliminat-

ing nonessentials Satie perhaps oversimplified, especially debilitating dynamic movement and expressivity, which most musicians consider hall- marks of music. He did not develop his motives; he avoided transitions; he interrupted and overlapped his recapitulations. The compositions became abstractions which might abruptly change mood, confronting us with what Lambert termed "emotional incongruity." The music is convo- luted and meandering, amorphous and diffused. Harmonic progressions lack perspective; melodies comprise short phrases and barren ostinatos. Devoid of passion, pictorialism, and drama, often cool and detached, in-

frequently witty or grotesque, the static quality of Satie's music deadens

26 For the following assessment of Satie's style, I am especially indebted to Con- stant Lambert, Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1948), pp. 95-96 passim; Rollo H. Myers, Erik Satie (New York: Dover, 1968), p. 52; and John Cage, "Defense of Satie," in Kostelanetz, op. cit., pp. 77-84.

27 Shattuck, p. 185. Said Satie: "They will tell you I am not a musician. That's

right. . . . Take the Fils des Etoiles, or the Morceaux en forme de poire, En habit de cheval, or the Sarabandes, it is clear no musical idea presided at the creation of these

works."-Cage, Silence, p. 79. See also W[ilfrid] H. M[ellers], "Satie, Erik (Alfred Les- lie)," in Blom, vol. 3, p. 418.

28Frederick W. Sternfeld, "Music and the Cinema," in Rollo W. Myers, ed.

Twentieth-Century Music (New York: Orion, 1968), p. 97; and Abraham Skulsky, in Kostelanetz, p. 91. The results can be heard in the clarity and simplicity of Thomson's film scores (The Plow That Broke the Plains, The River, Louisiana Story, The Goddess) and those of Copland (The City, Of Mice and Men, Our Town, The Red Pony, in particular). See also Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (New York: Hillstone/Stonehill, 1975), pp. 215-216. Mellers observes that Thomson's film music is based on a musical-visual, collage tech-

nique derived from Satie's Entr'acte. At its most characteristic, Thomson's music is suited to film "because it depends on very short phrases in reiterated and permutating patterns which can thereby simultaneously follow and disguise the fluctuations of cinematic 'cutting.'" Mellers broadly compares this phenomenon to "the cubist painters' reintegration in freshly surprising patterns of commonplace objects of the visible world."-Mellers, "Satie, Erik (Alfred Leslie)," op. cit., p. 417. Collaer refers to Satie's

repetition of "decorative rhythmic cells" as comprising a music "which clothes the silence" which otherwise would attend the film-Paul Collaer, A History of Modern Mu- sic, trans. Sally Abeles (Cleveland: World, 1961), p. 228.



Cinema Journal / 49

many listeners.29 Yet, in denuding his musical ideas, in nullifying them and making them impotent, rather than allowing them to be sentimental or rhetorical, Satie wrote music particularly suitable for silent film scoring.30 It can be said also that Satie's neutral approach to music offers a model solution to problems in sound film, particularly those concerned with continuity, background for dialogue,31 and propulsion of action. Thus it would be a hasty judgment to insist that Satie's Entr'acte accomplished little, even if, as pure listening experience, the music is exasperating. Considering the disparate kinds of music in film scores compiled until 1924 and since, we must judge Satie's musical collage as significant.

The score, historically important because it was composed when crude film music pasticcios were common, is also exemplary because it enabled the audience to experience cinema as a fusion of image and sound in which neither element was salient. The music was not convergent or di- vergent accompaniment to the images, but an element which combined with them in a perceptual mixture, following the principles of collage.32 Satie's structural approach to film music, whether intuitive or deliberate, and his proclivity for self-effacement ideally suited him for the role of film composer. Instead of overvaluing his music, he made the most of a limited musical vocabulary and syntax. The total artistic concept always came first, whether he worked in collaboration or composed in solitude. His cynicism and ironic sense of humor were graces that saved him from the perceived indignities that greater composers, such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky, suffered at the hands of the cinema.

Almost three decades after Entr'acte, John Cage urged egalitarian fusion of visual and sound elements as the valid approach to film music, with

29 San Francisco State University student Laura Drake said, in a pun Satie probably would have appreciated, that his music "quickly Satieated" her (January 1972). Cage had used the same pun over two decades earlier (April 1951)-see his "More Satie," in Kostelanetz, p. 92.

30W[ilfrid] H. M[ellers], "Film Music: The Musical Problem," p. 104. See also Sternfeld, p. 97.

31 His masterpiece, Socrate (1919), offers an ideal setting of dialogue. In provid- ing a background for Socrates's words, the music neither illustrates nor expropriates the dramatic and narrative elements in the text.

32 This is Cage's notion-see his "On Film," in Kostelanetz, pp. 115-116. On the other hand, Wilfrid Mellers argues that film is essentially visual; it is spatial before it is temporal. This is true for both sound and silent films, although the integration of music with other sounds is obviously more complex in contemporary films than in silent pictures. When films were mute, says Mellers, a key function of music was "to suggest a continuity which the succession of visual images did not intrinsically possess." In other words, while it was possible in silent films to integrate space through the tech- nique of cutting (montage), temporal continuity could more advantageously be trans- mitted to the spectator through music-Mellers, Music in a New Found Land, p. 448. Whichever notion we accept-Mellers's primacy of the visual or Cage's concept of egalitarian elements-the evidence is clear that Satie's Entr'acte score satisfies both aesthetic viewpoints.



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rhythmic structure as the organizing principle defining the parts and their relationship to the whole.33 He reasoned that

sound is characterized by its pitch, its loudness, its timbre, and its duration, and that silence, which is the opposite . . . of sound, is characterized only by its duration, [hence] of the four characteristics of the material of music, duration, that is, time length, is the most fundamental.34

Cage has also said that the film maker's most important task is to find a way for film to incorporate invisibility, just as music uses silence. The essence of the problem is "identification of activity with inactivity."35 This view, simply an extension from music to film of the concept of rhythmic structure, was inherited from Satie.

In the neo-Dada period of the sixties, thanks to LP recordings, Satie spoke to audiences surely larger than those he had ever anticipated. The communion was perhaps transient; yet in his limited body of compositions, mostly easily dismissed gropings and diversions, were laboratory examples for others to emulate and develop. Such an example was the music for Entr'acte. But the significant legacy of Erik Satie may very well be the aesthetic philosophy exemplified in this unique work, a philosophy which belatedly influenced a generation of composers and experimental film makers.

33 See Cage, "A Few Ideas About Music and Films," Film Music Notes, X (Janu- ary-February 1951), p. 12. Cage followed this principle in his score for the Herbert Matter film The Works of Calder (1951). He established a mathematical relationship between musical phrase lengths and the larger parts of the musical composition, ac- cording to the proportions determined by the lengths of the film sequences. As he says, "the major structural points in the film give me a particular structural articulation which in small is phraseology and in large is section-delimiting."

34 Cage, "Defense of Satie," loc. cit. 35 Of course, experimental film makers have found ways to do this, among them

Peter Kubelka, particularly in his structural film Arnulf Rainer (1957), a marvelously sophisticated, yet outwardly primitive work in which light and dark alternate rhythmic- ally in synchronism with bursts of white sound and silence (black sound). The Satie- Webern-Cage notion of rhythmic structure pertains equally to musique concrete and concrete cinema. Marcorelles derives his definition of concrete cinema from Pierre Schaeffer's ideas about compositions fashioned from musical and extra-musical sounds which are dependent for success upon a dialectical structure of activity-inactivity, sound- silence. See Pierre Schaeffer, La musique concrete (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1967), and Louis Marcorelles with Nicole Rouzet-Albagli, Living Cinema: New Directions in Contemporary Film-Making, trans. Isabel Quigly (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 127.



Documents

Satie's 'Entr'Acte' - A Model of Film Music