The year is 1890. You’re relaxing at a café in Paris, Le Chat Noir. The weather is cloudy and the air feels humid, but the storm won’t break for a while. Sipping from your cup, you realize the moment feels suspended in time in a bizarrely comforting way, yet you can’t exactly put your finger on why that is. And then, as you start focusing on your surroundings, you notice the music. Has it always been playing? It seems to adequately fill the room with a quiet feeling of harmony, and yet, when you try to listen to it, it ends up sounding both eerie and somewhat… Unremarkable. Just like the color in a painting.
This is “Gnossienne No.1”, by Erik Satie. The first of many, and a tune he would reinterpret throughout his life, alongside his even more renowned “Gymnopédies”, his entire life. Satie never liked studying, a trait that can be sensed in his style. His harmony is often characterised by brief, unresolved chords, and his melodies are generally simple. And yet, though this could be, and was at the time understood as laziness, Erik Satie made it very clear that he was trying to appeal to a much deeper idea.
Unconsciously, you had just listened to the first « musique d’ameublement », or furniture music.
In order to explain what that concept truly means, let me ask you one question. Users of Spotify, Deezer, YouTube Music, or any medium that can be used to listen to the wonderful art form that is music: How many minutes did you listen to this year? And of this time you spent listening, how much of it was active, and how much was only playing in the background, adding a certain rhythm to your every move, calming you down in stressful times, and allowing you moments of romantic reverie?
Recent studies have indicated that people listen to music more and more. This year, people listened on average to 20.7 hours of music every week, a number that has been increasing over the past few years. Music seems to have become more than just an art form; it truly has become an integral part of our lives. It is always present, has become impossible to do without, and yet completely normalized. One could say that music has gone beyond the reaches of entertainment to become a human need in and of itself. This vision correlates with the kind of music Satie wanted to create more than a century ago.
Erik Satie had often been called an impressionist artist, in that he tried to appeal to human perception and experience, depicting ordinary scenes and circumstances through music. His art has become iconic since and has successfully inspired more than one artist over the years. Some claim that the simplicity and originality of his style were influenced by his close friend Debussy; it is also possible that it was Satie who influenced Debussy. In any case, Satie, like Debussy, always rejected the title of Impressionism. Satie claimed he did not try to copy real-life scenes so much as he made music to complement them. Just like a piece of furniture in a vibrant room, he wanted his melodies to become part of the scene itself. In a letter to his fellow artist Jean Cocteau in 1920, Satie described his idea of music in a few paragraphs:
« We want to create music that satisfies “useful” needs. Art does not fall within these needs. Background music creates vibration; it has no other purpose; it fulfills the same role as light, heat, and comfort in all its forms.
Demand background music. No meetings, assemblies, etc., without background music. No weddings without background music.
Don’t fall asleep without listening to a piece of background music, or you will sleep poorly.”
Satie created music that, while inspired and rich in its own right, was not to be listened to carefully to be appreciated. Not unlike many pop songs today, it was made to be played in the background, to be felt, and to satisfy a ‘demand’. One hundred years later, music has become exactly what Satie seemed to anticipate: an omnipresent companion to everyday life.
Streaming platforms have transformed music into a constant presence. It accompanies us while we work, travel, study, or fall asleep. Playlists designed for focus, relaxation, or ambience accumulate millions of listeners, and songs are often chosen not for their complexity but for the atmosphere they create. Music has become a drug of which we may never tire.
