A colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde, Satie's work can now be seen as foreshadowing some of the major movements in 20th century music. Even in his early works Satie had started using a freehand style with no bar lines, arranged chromatically around complex chord structures. These approaches foreshadowed Debussy’s harmonic and timbre experiments. Over the course of his musical maturity, Satie would come to lay stylistic foundations for later artistic movements such as minimalism and repetitive music.
While Satie did not wholly reject Romanticism and its exponents like Wagner, he rejected certain aspects of it, including the idea of musical development in the strict definition of this term. Rather than utilize the intertwining of different themes in a development section (of a sonata form), his compositional style consisted of a newer "modern" style where, for example, a fugue would not extend further than the exposition of the theme(s).
His most famous works, the Gymnopédies, parallel Satie's introduction as a "gymnopedist" in 1887. Later, he also referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds") preferring this designation to that of a "musician." His Gymnopédie No. 1 (arguably the most heard of the three) has been arranged below for cello quartet.
Exclusive Satie Scores for Strings from Ovation Press
