Because of traditional reflexes, the audience stopped to listen to the music but Satie and Milhaud kept saying « Whatever you do, don’t listen! »… And that’s the day what we now know as background music was born. As a true avant-garde artist and a serial jokester, with that experience, Satie wanted to do away with the idea of music happening as an organized and paid for event. During that intermission, music was therefore a non-event, a piece of furniture in the grand scheme of things, just like lighting or heating. What was seen as a joke then is our life now, and it even has a name, « elevator music »: shops, elevator, bars, restaurants… Every moment is a musical one and it’s barely noticeable because it should not be. It’s ironic that the Gymnopédies, written way before Satie’s concept, eventually became mainstream elevator music.

Gymnopédie No. 1 by Erik Satie, played by Jacques Février in 1966. Musicologist and philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch used to say that Satie was the composer of mornings, because there is something matutinal about his music… I might add that he was more precisely the composer of Sunday mornings, even though there is nothing religious about his compositions: but there is a serenity, a calmness, an emptiness that modernity associates with Sundays; so here is your dose of Sunday morning music. In fact, Satie was the inventor of something very modern that surrounds your everyday life…

One day of 1920, Erik Satie organized something peculiar during the intermission of a concert by Max Jacobs. Indeed, it was the first outing of his concept of « musique d’ameublement » (furnishing music). The principle is simple: the public should walk around and discuss as if it were a normal intermession while musicians played music that should not be actively listened to…

Who is the author of the work?Did you recognize the music??

how will this musical instrument be in your language?Do you like the sound of it???

Thjalfi, known for his incredible speed, offered to race anyone in the castle, only to be bested. Thor, known for his immense strength and love of drink, then challenged the inhabitants of the castle to a drinking contest, and was humiliated. Utgarda-Loki revealed that the contests had been illusions, and the gods left the castle wiser and more cautious for having encountered the cunning Utgarda-Loki. And the tale of their encounter would be told and retold, a cautionary reminder of the folly of underestimating the power of illusion and trickery.