Variations on the theme of "ballet" in the works of Eric Satie

Abstract

The work of Erik Satie, his value assessment, as well as the peculiarities of the author's non-normative artistic thinking have repeatedly become the subject of musicological discussions, but still a number of his artistic discoveries in different genre areas remain out of the researchers' field of vision. The proposed article analyzes the French composer's ballet work, which became a space of experimentation in the process of searching for a new image of a musical-choreographic performance. The material of the study includes not only the odious "Parade", which became a manifesto of the "new art", but also four other works by Erik Satie in the genre of ballet, without the study of which it is impossible to draw a complete picture of this sphere ("Uspud", "The Adventures of Mercury", "Eccentric Beauty", "The Spectacle is Canceled"). Their consideration from the point of view of the evolution of the author's approach to the creation of music for a ballet performance, as well as in the aspect of revealing content-semantic, compositional-dramaturgical and stylistic innovations, is the subject of research in this article. In the process of studying the problem, a comprehensive approach is applied, combining comparative and cultural-historical methods with theoretical and analytical tools of musicology. In the course of the analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that all components of the artistic whole of a ballet performance undergo transformation. At the narrative and semantic level, there is a gradual rejection of the traditional libretto, procedurally revealing the fabula of what is happening on stage, in favor of a small script plan, often without development and cause-and-effect relationships between episodes. The compositional and dramaturgical solution of the ballets is based on the suite, which is the root of the genre, but interpreted in a modified form, with the active involvement of combinatorics and montage. The musical and stylistic appearance of the performances is also often determined by an "anti-academic" concept characteristic not only of this genre, but also of Erik Satie's work in general. The sound space of the composer's ballets is highly heterogeneous and represents a mix of academic musical traditions with the culture of everyday life, both musical (music hall, cabaret, jazz) and extra-musical (the use of everyday objects reproducing the noise of the urban environment in the score of Parade).