Erik Satie

Born in 1866 to a French father and British mother, Satie washed out of the Paris Conservatoire without a diploma and spent the 1880s playing piano in Montmartre café-cabarets, where he composed the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes - unresolved, bar-line-free, shaped by old church modes. After years of thin output he returned to school as a mature student at the Schola Cantorum and this time succeeded. By 1910 young composers began clustering around his spare, terse alternative to Impressionism; the cohort included Les Six. A 1915 meeting with Jean Cocteau yielded Parade, the 1917 Diaghilev ballet with Picasso sets that scandalized Paris. He influenced Ravel, Debussy, Poulenc in his lifetime, and later Cage and Adams. He lived alone in a single room in Arcueil from 1898 until cirrhosis killed him in 1925, age 59, having never married and having drunk heavily all his life.