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This sounds like Futurism or the passionate patterns of the Cubists, but I assure you I've seen and tried to play the piano music of Satie. That he is an arch-humbug I shall neither maintain nor deny. After Schoenberg anything is possible in this vale of agonising dissonance.
It is hardly necessary to consider here the fantastic fashionings of Erik Satie, the "newest" French composer. He seems to have out-Schoenberged Schoenberg in his little piano pieces bearing the alluring titles of Embryons desséchés, preludes and pastorales. Apart from the extravagant titles, the music itself is ludicrous qua music, but not without subtle irony.
The harmonies of Gluck are extremely simple, those of Richard Strauss extremely complex. H. T. Finck says somewhere that one of the greatest charms of music is modulation but the old church composers who wrote in the "modes" never modulated at all. Erik Satie seldom avails himself of this modern device. It is a question whether Leo Ornstein modulates.
The humour of the new composers is melancholy in its originality, but Gauguin has said that in art one must be either a plagiarist or a revolutionist. Satie is hardly a plagiarist, though the value of his revolution is doubtful.
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