Reading Queer Continuums in Gymnopédie No. 3: A Conversation with Satie, and Cage, and Me (and You)

Abstract

ABSTRACT After three family members’ deaths, expulsion from the Paris Conservatoire for perceived lack of talent, and escaping compulsory military service via deliberate bronchitis infection, Erik Satie returned to Montmartre and soon composed the Trois Gymnopédies (1888). Gymnopédie no. 1's famously liminal simplicity is now culturally ubiquitous. This article speaks to the lacuna between Satie's nebulous queerness and his favoured term ‘gymnopédie’ by unveiling a somatic gesture in the oft-forgotten Gymnopédie no. 3 where the player's hands interlace to sustain overlapped chord voicings. To read this gesture as a form of touch that queers classical technique, I contextualise the suite's affects in Satie's grief-laden biographical moment, and analyse Gymnopédie no. 3's somatic device via traditional music analysis. I examine John Cage's sonic pedagogies developed during his 1948 Black Mountain College lectures to show how Cage's paradigm of embodiment was derived from Satie's methodological treatment of embodied experience. Finally, I include a transdisciplinary somatic interpretation of Gymnopédie no. 3 to contrast customary music analysis. As a practice of perverse presentism, I seek to write within historical tenuity surrounding Satie's queer positionality and the Gymnopédies, necessitating queer pedagogies that visit this question without engaging the critical tendency to essentialise queerness as transhistorical fact.