PIERREJEAN GAUCHER'S NEW ALBUM

Here's a snippet of Pierrejean Gaucher's new album, to be released next month.

"Zappe Satie" is Pierrejean's tribute to the music of Erik Satie.

On a similar note, here's Joel Thome discussing why he added Erik Satie's 'Socrate' to the 1991 Zappa Universe program :

The program at Zappa's Universe includes not only his works but also Erik Satie's 'Socrate'. What led to this pairing of composers?

I feel that there's a unique connection between their music. I'm not sure that Frank would share that feeling, but as someone coming from a more objective standpoint I think that Satie and Varèse should both be recognized as pillars in Frank's music. There was a very close feeling between the musics of Satie and Varèse, which is important because Frank considers Varèse his mentor.

Did Zappa object to having Satie on the program?

Not really. His feeling was that he didn't know how the audience would react to Satie. But my feeling was that audiences often react to Satie and Varèse in identical ways, which would be something in the neighborhood of the reaction at the premiere of [Stravinsky's] Le Sacre du Printemps. In any event, I felt that the audience reaction would just be a part of the totality of the theatre that occurs. In fact, I would have liked to have had the Socrate moving during the Zappa pieces.

Simultaneous performances?

Sure. If you took Zappa's Universe and superimposed the Satie Socrate on it, that would be a very special moment. In a way, that's what happened, regardless of who listened and who didn't listen to the Socrate, because the piece made a very powerful impact.

So the audience at the Ritz has been pretty vociferous?

Yeah, because with Frank's music they're used to shouting out the text and singing along and all of that. But at the same time, there is that part of the audience that has come to hear the Socrate and see the Calder sets. [Artist Alexander Calder designed the hanging sets at the Ritz in 1934, based on the sets used at the premiere of Socrate in 1918.] In the last two concerts, after doing the video and CD recording, we had to be very careful about overtime, so we had to limit the performances of the Socrate on those nights to just the second movement. I remember that when Dweezil [Zappa, guitarist and son of Frank] announced that we were going to do only the second movement on the second night, one rocker stood up and shouted, "But what about all three movements?" That was really wonderful because it shows that a crossover exists.

Unlike Satie's work, much of Zappa's orchestral music can hardly be called simple. He seems to pursue a harmonic complexity that is more characteristic of the Schoenberg school than of what Satie was doing.

Those are surface characteristics. When you get in touch with the similarities of their work, in dynamics, in texture, even in text, that overcomes the dissimilarities.

The complete transcript of this interview from Keyboard Magazine, February 1992:
https://www.afka.net/Articles/1992-02_Keyboard.htm