Le Fils des Étoiles
or
NOTES OF A MAMMAL
First performance of unfinished music-theater
by Erik Satie, 115 years after the fact
" Subtle re-make of elusive Satie..
" Intriguing play of rituals revives in free adaptation...
" Radios and gramophones help pianist in ancient
'mammalnotes'..
"within the small freedom that Satie offers, Reinier van Houdt
shows he possesses a broad sense for colour and nuance,
at least equaled by his performance as an actor. Together with
actress Barbara Duijfjes he plays a mysterious game of rituals
that leaves a lot of question-marks, but that perfectly connects
with the elusive world of sound that Satie and composer van " A white play without words
Rossum have created.."
De Volkskrant
"Satie would have been thrilled by this performance...dream-like
music, confusing imagery, hypnotic acts, they all create a sense
of wonder that is hard to put into words..this is surprise after
surprise..this white performance finally has become totally Satie
Dagblad Trouw
On December 5th 2007 in Holland the premiere took place of the music-theatrepiece Notes of a mammal.
It comprises the first staged performance of Erik Satie's complete LE FILS DES ÉTOILES, a music that only recently was published by Scratch Orchestra-member Christopher Hobbs. Satie wrote it in 1892 as a commission for Joséphin Péladan's play by the same name.
Péladan - a keyfigure of the Rosicrucians - wanted a grand Wagnerian happening, where massive dramatic sounds would submissively illustrate his text.
Satie however wrote a very cool, sublime, almost motionless music for solo piano that ignored the drama.
Satie: "..my ideal would be that the music doesn't move a muscle when a protagonist enters...I want to create a musical scenery where characters can move freely.."
Satie and Péladan had disagreements and of course a performance never happened..
But what díd Satie actually imagine with his music ?
The fascination for this question united 115 years later a visual artist, a composer, an actress and a pianist in Notes of a mammal - a first visual and musical performance of Le Fils des Étoiles.
It is a hybrid of visual art, new music and performance-art, and it wants to be a contemporary tribute to the extraordinary artist Erik Satie - a composer that "thinks in images". It is a new form of theatre, where music and image are irreducible elements that no longer submit to each other or to a story. Instead they come together in one integral score for sound, image, action and light.
Composer Piet-Jan van Rossum created a for the most part new composition, with Satie's long forgotten stage-music Le Fils des Étoiles as material. The scores as found in the archives was complete, but obviously not ready for publication. By getting under Satie's skin and re-composing the piece, van Rossum opens the music to the present time. In his instrumentation he uses not only piano, but also old gramophones, world-receivers, laptops and tape-recorders, the whole distributed in a refined detailed spatial sound-design.
Visual artist Petra van der Schoot developed an image-scenario that is inspired by the way Satie experienced the world and survived it as an artist:
"Satie was a "thinker in images", in the world of music. The special thing about him is that he thought that the morality and mentality of the artist/man and that of the work of art should correspond. In spite of all the colourful eccentricities and dada-pranks, Satie's life was devoted to an impossible and almost tragic-comical striving for 'Whiteness'.."
In a contemporary setting of radio's, videoprojections, sculptures, pathephones and laptops in an austere black-and-white decor with coloured light,
actress Barbara Duijfjes and pianist Reinier van Houdt here conjugate Satie's material like in a game of chess, played by the imagination with sounds and objects. They enter the ghostlike realm beyond the story, the soft static behind every image - images like in a dream, without inside or outside.
Robbed of every story we join Satie in poverty, behind the piano, and we follow him through the absurd worlds that seem to manifest from his own piano-playing. At the same time we travel from Satie's time to our present time.
An ode to Satie: his ideas and techniques have silently become common property, whereas Satie himself has been forgotten - so have the mentality and necessity from which his work resulted. These are what the artists want to show again with Notes of a mammal.
Scenario/Image: Petra v/d Schoot - Music/Sound: Piet-Jan van Rossum & Erik Satie - Actress: Barbara Duijfjes - Idea/Pianist: Reinier van Houdt - Lightdesign: Albert Tulling