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Sports et Divertissements Satie arranged by Tony Turrill
To listen to some computer generated extracts, click on the quaver. You will hear:
Erik Satie was commissioned to write these twenty short pieces to accompany a set of twenty illustrations by Charles Martin, a fashionable illustrator at the time of the Great War. Martin’s pictures are populated by characters who, if they were English, would be very much at ease taking tea from a Clarise Cliff cup, driving their open topped Bentley with its leather wrap over bonnet straps, spending the weekend at Blandings Castle and reading novels by P.G.Wodehouse, no doubt with dust jackets illustrated by Martin. However, as they were very French, Aunt Agatha would certainly have disapproved of their décolletage and sent them packing. As well as composing the music, Satie also provided a “story line” which is printed in the score in his original French . An English version is in the parts, no doubt losing some of its Gallic double entendre in translation but providing an indication, if not always a clear one, of what Satie had in mind. The French version is placed where Satie wrote it in the manuscript so the words may, if you so choose, be declaimed, Facade style, as the piece is played. In the parts, their location is indicated by the bar numbers which precede each phrase. Satie provides no metronome markings. All of those given in the score are editorial and can therefore be ignored if you so wish. They have been chosen in an attempt to match words, music and illustrations but, with markings such as “Joie modere”, “Petitement” and “Hypocritement”, selecting the tempo is not a precise art.
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