If asked to name our favorite French com­pos­er of the late nine­teenth or ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, most of us would reach straight for Erik Satie, being able to bring to mind only his most famous pieces, the Gymnopédies and per­haps the Gnossi­ennes. We may not know that those works all date from the same few years of his career between the late eigh­teen-eight­ies and the ear­ly nineties. They also rep­re­sent only a small por­tion indeed of his artis­tic out­put, which includes a great deal of instru­men­tal and vocal music as well as com­po­si­tions for dra­mat­ic works, writ­ten between 1886 and his death in 1925 — the com­ing hun­dredth anniver­sary of which is being cel­e­brat­ed with the record­ing of new­ly dis­cov­ered pieces.

As the Guardian’s Dalya Alberge writes, these “twen­ty-sev­en pre­vi­ous­ly unheard works by Erik Satie, from play­ful cabaret songs to min­i­mal­ist noc­turnes” have been “painstak­ing­ly pieced togeth­er from hun­dreds of small note­books,” most of them writ­ten “in the bohemi­an bistros of Mont­martre in Paris where Satie worked as a pianist.”

Their redis­cov­ery owes to the efforts of two com­posers, James Nye and Sato Mat­sui, who “tracked down the lost mate­r­i­al in var­i­ous archival col­lec­tions, includ­ing the Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France.” They’ve now been record­ed by pianist Alexan­dre Tha­raud, and you can hear the result­ing album, Satie: Dis­cov­er­ies, in the Youtube playlist at the top of the post.

Famous in his native France and else­where, Tha­raud’s pro­fes­sion­al involve­ment with the work of his esteemed pre­de­ces­sor and coun­try­man goes back to at least 2009, when he orga­nized a Satie Day at Paris’ Cité de la Musique. That same year, he record­ed Satie’s 1915 com­po­si­tions Avant-dernières Pen­sées, or “Penul­ti­mate Thoughts. Once dis­missed as minor, even by the com­poser’s enthu­si­asts, the Avant-dernières Pen­sées have since risen in sta­tus to become some of his most often per­formed lat­er works. With the 27 short pieces that con­sti­tute Dis­cov­er­ies, Tha­raud’s chal­lenge was­n’t to come up with a fresh rein­ter­pre­ta­tion, but the very first inter­pre­ta­tion any of us will ever have heard, leav­ing it to the next cen­tu­ry of pianists to put their own spins on them.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Ani­mat­ed Scores of Eric Satie’s Most Famous Pieces: “Gymno­pe­die No. 1” and “Gnossi­enne No. 1”

How Erik Satie’s ‘Fur­ni­ture Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Way for Ambi­ent Music

Watch the 1917 Bal­let “Parade”: Cre­at­ed by Erik Satie, Pablo Picas­so & Jean Cocteau, It Pro­voked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Sur­re­al­ism”

The Vel­vet Underground’s John Cale Plays Erik Satie’s Vex­a­tions on I’ve Got a Secret (1963)

A Son­ic Intro­duc­tion to Avant-Garde Music: Stream 145 Min­utes of 20th Cen­tu­ry Art Music, Includ­ing Mod­ernism, Futur­ism, Dadaism & Beyond

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Pho­to of Karl­heinz Stock­hausen by Kathin­ka Pasveer via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

You may hear the phrase “elec­tron­ic music” and think of super­star dub­step DJs in fun­ny hel­mets at beach­side celebri­ty par­ties. Alter­na­tive­ly, you may think of the mer­cu­r­ial com­po­si­tions of Karl­heinz Stock­hausen, the musique con­crete of Pierre Hen­ry, or the oth­er­world­ly exper­i­men­tal­ism of François Bayle. If you’re in that lat­ter camp of music nerd, then this post may bring you very glad tid­ings indeed. Ubuweb—that stal­wart repos­i­to­ry of all things 20th-cen­tu­ry avant-garde—now hosts an extra­or­di­nary com­pi­la­tion: the 476-song His­to­ry of Electronic/Electroacoustic Music, orig­i­nal­ly a 62 CD set. (Hear below Stockhausen’s “Kon­tact,” Henry’s “Astrolo­gie,” and Bayle’s spare “The­atre d’Ombres” fur­ther down.)

Span­ning the years 1937–2001, the col­lec­tion should espe­cial­ly appeal to those with an avant-garde or musi­co­log­i­cal bent. In fact, the orig­i­nal uploader of this archive of exper­i­men­tal sound, Caio Bar­ros, put these tracks online in 2009 while a stu­dent of com­po­si­tion at Brazil’s State Uni­ver­si­ty of São Paulo. Bar­ros’ “ini­tia­tive,” as he writes at Ubuweb, “became some sort of leg­end” among musi­cophiles in the know.

And yet, Ubuweb reposts this phe­nom­e­nal col­lec­tion with a dis­claimer: “It’s a clear­ly flawed selec­tion,” they write:

There’s few women and almost no one work­ing out­side of the West­ern tra­di­tion (where are the Japan­ese? Chi­nese? etc.). How­ev­er, as an effort, it’s admirable and con­tains a ton of great stuff.

Take it with a grain of salt, or per­haps use it as a provo­ca­tion to curate a more intel­li­gent, inclu­sive, and com­pre­hen­sive selec­tion

It’s a fair cri­tique, though Bar­ros points out that the exclu­sions most­ly have to do with “the way our soci­ety and the tra­di­tion this music rep­re­sent works” (sic). And yet, as dis­ci­pli­nary bound­aries expand all the time, and his­to­ries broad­en along with them, that descrip­tion no longer holds. It would be a fas­ci­nat­ing exer­cise, for exam­ple, to lis­ten to these tracks along­side the his­to­ry of women in elec­tron­ic music, 1938–2014 that we post­ed recent­ly.

Also, there’s clear­ly much more to elec­tron­ic music than either celebri­ty DJs or obscure avant-garde com­posers. Many hun­dreds of pop­u­lar elec­tron­ic com­posers and musicians—like Bri­an Eno, Kraftwerk, Bruce Haack, or Clara Rock­more—fall some­where in-between the worlds of pop/dance/performance and seri­ous com­po­si­tion, and their con­tri­bu­tions deserve rep­re­sen­ta­tion along­side more exper­i­men­tal or clas­si­cal artists.

All that said, how­ev­er, there’s no rea­son you can’t curate your own playlist of the his­to­ry of elec­tron­ic music as you see it—drawing from the astound­ing wealth of music avail­able free at The His­to­ry of Elec­troa­coustic Music. Or con­sid­er this col­lec­tion a ful­ly immer­sive course in “tra­di­tion­al, west­ern avant-garde elec­tron­ic music” from “the area of Europe-Amer­i­ca,” as Bar­ros puts it. As that, it suc­ceeds admirably.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Clara Rock­more, the Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Ear­ly 1920s

What is Elec­tron­ic Music?: Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938- 2014)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

In 1976 and 1977 an inspired music teacher in the small school dis­trict of Lan­g­ley Town­ship, British Colum­bia, a sub­urb of Van­cou­ver, record­ed his ele­men­tary school stu­dents singing pop­u­lar songs in a school gym. Two vinyl records were pro­duced over the two years, and fam­i­lies were invit­ed to pay $7 for a copy. The record­ings were large­ly for­got­ten — just anoth­er per­son­al memen­to stored away in a few homes in West­ern Cana­da — until a record col­lec­tor stum­bled across a copy in a thrift store in 2000.

Enthralled by what he heard, the col­lec­tor sent a sam­ple to a disc jock­ey at WFMU, an eclec­tic, lis­ten­er-sup­port­ed radio sta­tion in New Jer­sey. The sta­tion began play­ing some of the songs over the air­waves. Lis­ten­ers were touched by the haunt­ing, ethe­re­al qual­i­ty of the per­for­mances. In 2001, a small record com­pa­ny released a com­pi­la­tion called The Lan­g­ley Town­ship Music Project: Inno­cence & Despair.

The record became an under­ground hit. The Wash­ing­ton Post called it “an album that seems to cap­ture noth­ing less than the sound of falling in love with music.” Spin said the album “seems to sum up all the rea­sons music is holy.” And Dwight Gamer of The New York Times wrote that the music was “mag­ic: a kind of celes­tial pep ral­ly.” Lis­ten­ers were moved by the ingen­u­ous­ness of the young voic­es, the strange authen­tic­i­ty of per­for­mances by chil­dren too young to under­stand all of the adult themes in the lyrics. As Hans Fenger, the music teacher who made the record­ings, writes in the lin­er notes:

The kids had a grasp of what they liked: emo­tion, dra­ma, and mak­ing music as a group. Whether the results were good, bad, in tune or out was no big deal — they had élan. This was not the way music was tra­di­tion­al­ly taught. But then I nev­er liked con­ven­tion­al “chil­dren’s music,” which is con­de­scend­ing and ignores the real­i­ty of chil­dren’s lives, which can be dark and scary. These chil­dren hat­ed “cute.” They cher­ished songs that evoked lone­li­ness and sad­ness.

You can learn the sto­ry of Fenger’s extra­or­di­nary music project in the 2002 VH1 doc­u­men­tary above, which includes inter­views and a reunion with some of the stu­dents. And lis­ten below for a few sam­ples of that touch­ing qual­i­ty of lone­li­ness and sad­ness Fenger and oth­ers have been talk­ing about.

David Bowie’s ‘Space Odd­i­ty’:

One of the most wide­ly praised songs from Inno­cence & Despair is the 1976 record­ing of David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty.” In a 2001 inter­view with Mike Appel­stein for Scram mag­a­zine, Fenger explained the sound effects in the record­ing. “When I first taught ‘Space Odd­i­ty,’ ” he said, “the first part I taught after the song was the kids count­ing down. They loved that: they’d go ‘TEN!’ They could­n’t say it loud enough; the count­down in the song was the big win­ner. But as soon as they got to zero, noth­ing hap­pened. So I brought this old steel gui­tar. Well, one of the lit­tle guys whose name I’ve for­got, I put him on this thing and said, ‘Now lis­ten, when they get to zero, you’re the rock­et. So make a lot of noise on this. He’s fool­ing around with this steel gui­tar, and I did­n’t even think of this, but he intu­itive­ly took out a Coke bot­tle from his lunch and start­ed doing this (imi­tates a bot­tle run­ning up and down the fret­board). I just cranked up the vol­ume and turned down the mas­ter vol­ume so it was real­ly dis­tort­ed. And that was the ‘Space Odd­i­ty’ sound effect.”

The Beach Boys’ ‘In My Room’:

The chil­dren record­ed “In My Room” by the Beach Boys in 1977. Fenger told Appel­stein it was the ulti­mate chil­dren’s song. “It’s the per­fect intro­spec­tive song for a nine-year-old,” he said, “just as ‘Dust in the Wind’ is the per­fect phi­los­o­phy song for a nine-year-old. Adults may think it’s dumb, but for a child, it’s a very heavy, pro­found thought. To think that there is noth­ing, and it’s expressed in such a sim­ple way.”

The Eagles’ ‘Des­per­a­do’:

Sev­er­al of the record­ings fea­ture soloists. A young girl named Sheila Behman sang the Eagles’ “Des­per­a­do” in 1977. “With ‘Des­per­a­do,’ ” said Fenger, “you can see it as a cow­boy roman­tic sto­ry, but that’s not the way Sheila heard it. She could­n’t artic­u­late metaphor­i­cal­ly what the song was about, but in that sense, I think it was pur­er because it was unaf­fect­ed. It’s not as if the kids were try­ing to be some­body else. They were just try­ing to be who they were, and they’re doing this music and falling in love with it.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

David Bowie Urges Kids to READ in a 1987 Poster Spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion

David Bowie Pre­dicts the Good & Bad of the Inter­net in 1999: “We’re on the Cusp of Some­thing Exhil­a­rat­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing”

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

When David Bowie Launched His Own Inter­net Ser­vice Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics