Episode Details

Erik Satie composed music he called "furniture music" — designed to be heard but not listened to, meant to fill a room the way wallpaper fills a wall. He invented ambient music seventy years before Brian Eno gave it a name. He ate only white foods, owned twelve identical grey velvet suits, and lived in a tiny apartment that no one entered for twenty-seven years.

This episode traces Satie from his solitary Parisian existence through the Gymnopedies, his friendship with Debussy, his collaboration with Cocteau and Picasso, and the radical simplicity that anticipated minimalism.

• His Gymnopedies, composed in 1888, remain among the most recognizable piano pieces ever written
• He coined the term "furniture music" for compositions designed as background sound, anticipating ambient music
• He ate only white foods and owned twelve identical grey velvet suits, which were found stacked in his apartment after his death
• No one entered his apartment for twenty-seven years until after his death, when friends found it filled with unopened letters and two pianos stacked one atop the other