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Satie's Gymnopedies have been on our household's "calming & focused" playlists for years now. Highly recommend, and I look forward to hearing these new works,
by eitally 1y ago
Satie's Gymnopedies have been on our household's "calming & focused" playlists for years now. Highly recommend, and I look forward to hearing these new works, too.
- TZubiri 1y agoDid you perchance find these originally on youtube? They're very popular on their autosuggestions.
- viraptor 1y agoIt got very popular with the raise of lofi. The Gymnopedie samples are everywhere.
- jiehong 1y agoThey’ve been a bit everywhere for decades I think. Like I think in movies such as The Royal Tenenbaums of Wes Anderson. I think I heard it more or less since childhood.
- williamdclt 1y agoThey’re hugely famous, I don’t think most people’s first encounter with them would be as YouTube suggestions
- andrepd 1y agoIndeed, they feature in a number of media. I think I first heard them in the Mother 3 game!
- amrocha 1y agoI think you’re overestimating how much people listen to music from 100 years ago. Youtube is probably hugely responsible for Erik’s modern popularity.
- iainmerrick 1y agoI can assure you that Satie’s music was very, very well-known and popular (even though most people wouldn’t recognise his name) long before YouTube existed. Most people don’t intentionally listen to 100-year-old music, sure, but you’re underestimating how much we absorb this stuff as background music in ads, movies, TV shows etc. Most classical music is very niche but a few pieces become cornerstones of popular culture -- think of “flight of the bumblebee” or the William Tell overture. Satie has a disproportionate number of hits. His style is exceptionally simple, distinct and timeless.
- amrocha 1y agoThat’s not my argument. Even if his music was “absorbed”, it doesn’t mean people know who he is. I’d argue that most people under 30 who know Erik found him through youtube. If you’re older I can understand why it seems perplexing but it’s true in my experience.
- iainmerrick 1y agoYes, of course, YouTube is super popular. By definition, that’s the medium through which a huge number of people experience culture. And YouTube itself has shaped and redirected culture. But what you said was: Youtube is probably hugely responsible for Erik’s modern popularity. That makes it sound like people weren’t aware of this music before YouTubers started picking it up. That’s very much not the case. If you’re just talking about name recognition rather than the music itself, I suppose that’s possible as I don’t think his name was all that widely known. You’d have to show that it is more widely known now, though. My guess would be that his music is familiar to quite a large fraction of people, but that most still don’t know his name. I’m not trying to be snobby about this -- there’s plenty of catchy classical music I really like where I can only vaguely guess at the composer. I just happen to know and like Satie. It helps that a lot of his music is relatively easy to play for an amateur pianist like me.
- mdrzn 1y agoI actually discovered Satie's music by listening to a track that used Gnossienne n°1 as a sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-sS_Ts2Bjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-sS_Ts2Bjc From there went deep in research on whosampled.com.
- ithkuil 1y agoThere are a lot of interpretations of Satie's work and a random playlist on YouTube may not necessarily get you the best performers, also because not everybody has the same tastes in music. My favourite interpretation of Satie's is played by Reinbert de Leeuw. He plays very slow, playing just a bit behind the beat, with astonishing precision and expressiveness.
- garciansmith 1y agoYes, I agree. I also like Aki Takahashi.
- zahlman 1y agoI have three different recordings of Satie's Gymnopedies on CD from many years ago: de Leeuw's, coming in at almost 16 minutes total; a version from 1968 by William Masselos totaling about 9 minutes; and on the extreme end, Klára Körmendi's version totaling less than 7 minutes. When I used to play piano, I once timed myself playing them to my own preference. As I recall, it was around 11 minutes at the speed that makes sense to me. Chacun a son gout. (Satie himself claimed to only eat foods that are white, after all.)
- ithkuil 1y agoHe also claimed to eat only fat of dead animals, so yes nothing too peculiar I must say
- eitally 1y agoActually, my wife discovered them via Calm or Headspace because they were used in something there. We then added them to YT Music playlists.