Erik Satie

Erik Satie made simplicity a kind of rebellion. Born in the Normandy port town of Honfleur in 1866, he settled in Paris, dropped out of the Conservatoire, and earned his living playing piano in the cabarets of Montmartre. While his contemporaries wrote ever grander music, he wrote short piano pieces of deliberate plainness, spare, unhurried, and strange, and gave them deadpan titles or instructions no one could quite take seriously.

He lived alone in the suburb of Arcueil in a room almost nobody was allowed to enter, and walked miles into Paris each day. Late in life the younger generation adopted him as a hero, and he collaborated with Cocteau and Picasso on the ballet Parade, which put typewriters and sirens in the orchestra.

Start with the 3 Gymnopédies, then the Gnossiennes, and let the quiet do its work.