Erik Satie Three Piece Suite

By Ian Penman

"Ian Penman, whose book on Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of our favorites last year, has written another billet-doux to an admired artist. Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is a resolutely lightsome and subtly melancholic incantation of one of early 20th-century's most elusive and ambiguous figures. The slim but stellar volume parades and amalgamates an abundant cast of symbols and characters in the service of the “tiny ornament of a man” Erik Satie. Arranged in three parts—piccolo encyclopedia,essay, and diary (plus a tiny overture)—the book is strewn with fascinating fragments, melancholy facts, and sunny asides. Three Piece Suite argues that “a retrieved mythos can be small-scale, un-dramatic, a breeze through the leaves” and insists (with Satie) that 'it is possible to be radical and light-hearted at the same time.'“
–Herbert Pföstl

Composer, pianist, and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit, and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before surrealism and a conceptual artist before conceptual art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There's scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn't anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre's Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demimonde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman's masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three-part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie's death.

2025; paperback; 5" x 8"; 200 pages; ISBN: 9781635902532.