Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (17 May 1866 – 1 July 1925), known as Erik Satie, was a French composer and pianist born in Honfleur to a French father and a British mother. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire without distinction and left without a diploma. From the 1880s he worked as a pianist in the café-cabarets of Montmartre, where he associated with Symbolist writers and later with Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and the group of composers known as Les Six.

Satie’s spare, unconventional piano miniatures — above all the Gymnopédies (1888) and Gnossiennes (1890) — rejected the grand Romantic and Wagnerian aesthetic of his era in favor of stillness, repetition, and understatement, anticipating ambient music, minimalism, and the aesthetic of composers from Debussy to John Cage. His pieces have been widely transcribed for guitar and remain among the most recognizable works in the classical repertoire.

Compare recordings piece by piece — 3 works of Erik Satie with more than one performance on the site →

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Satie