Pipedown is the campaign to get rid of the scourge of unwanted piped background muzak, whether on hold on the telephone, in a restaurant, or queuing in a supermarket. The late pianist Alfred Brendel ...

Aldo Ciccolini at the piano. Back in the 1960s, composer Erik Satie’s limpid, odd, but wonderful solo piano music became known largely through the recordings of the late Aldo Ciccolini, who very ...

Safe at home this spring has not necessarily meant sane at home. One antidote is a mega-dose of Erik Satie. The French composer’s most beguiling and languidly becalming piano pieces, particularly the ...

This glorious biography of the whimsical, elusive French composer celebrates the depths of his seemingly sunny music and the impact he had on other forms Music is extremely difficult to write about.

When Richard Toop played the 840 repetitions of Satie’s Vexations in 1967, the ‘mild stimulant’ he asked for turned out to be anything but, writes Biddy Peppin To perform Erik Satie’s piano piece ...

In Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite, a study of the avant-garde pianist, Ian Penman resists the urge to categorise Satie neatly, avoiding the reductive tendencies that often plague biographies. Satie’s ...

If you forgot to celebrate Erik Satie’s 150th birthday on May 17, he forgives you. Really, he does. What’s that, you speak of a legacy worth honoring? A sesquicentenary? One imagines the urbane French ...

This is starting to look like the year of Erik Satie. How else could there be two magnificent albums dedicated to his music? The first was Dan Willis and Velvet Gentlemen's The Satie Project (Daywood ...

A performance of Erik Satie’s piano piece Vexations can last 20 hours. But is it avant-garde art, or a misunderstood joke? Ivan Hewett is The Telegraph’s Classical Music Critic and an author whose ...

Today I heard–for the thousandth time– Satie’s famous solo piano tryptic 3 Gymopedies—the title refers to an ancient Spartan dance performed by naked men. Satie was an eccentric who gave his ...