Conference Agenda

One hundred years after his death, Satie will attend his first AMS Annual Meeting. This séance brings the composer back from the dead for one evening to sit in dialogue with a panel of music scholars whose work explores Satie, his world, and his legacy. The material defiance of this revenant encounter will be especially advantageous in gaining insight into the various creative “rebirths” Satie experienced during his career.

Eulogies, memorials, and music will naturally be part of our séance (no burning candles needed). Panelists will ask Satie about his relationship to the canon and canonicity, about his appropriation by figures as different as Debussy, Jankélévitch, Cage, and Janet Jackson, about his difficult relationship with the press and other institutions, and about some of his more perplexing decisions in life. (Was it worth it, in the end, to write that postcard to Poueigh and get caught up in a messy court trial?). There may be special guests from his past as well. Might Jean Cocteau, or the Princesse de Polignac make an appearance to assess Satie’s originality and impact?

Ultimately, the séance brings North American scholars of Erik Satie together to question how we memorialize a musician as quirky, irreverent, and contradictory as Satie. We seek to question the practice of memorializing composers on their anniversaries itself, asserting that this is a covert practice of encomium, contriving an occasion to celebrate rather than critique. Perhaps the only way to honor a composer of impossible works is, in the end, to attempt the impossible ourselves.