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…