Gymnopédie

When I was younger and used to fight against turning on the radio in various contexts, when it was proposed as a way to pass time and fill the silence, I was sometimes accused by friends of disliking music. This, however, was a misunderstanding of the situation. The truth has always been that I run either extremely hot or deathly cold on any specific piece of music. Many bore me. When one does move me, however, it grasps me unspeakably. I will be able to think of little else the rest of the day. My feelings will have been entirely waylaid and held prisoner by a single tune.

Listening to music, therefore, is for me an enterprise fraught with emotional danger. It is very difficult for me to find anything, therefore, that I can safely trust will be "easy listening."

One piece that has always had this strong effect on me, as it has had on many others before me, is the "Lent et douloureux" Gymnopédie of Erik Satie. I can trace this reaction to childhood, when my mom used to play it on the piano downstairs, and I would sit on the landing of our staircase and listen from the other room. Whenever I happen to overhear it now, I am suddenly D.H. Lawrence listening to his mother on the piano, and like him "my manhood is cast/ Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past."

Not wanting to risk being reduced to such a state on a regular basis, I have taken therefore to avoiding the piece. But it pursues me. A year or so ago, taking a cue from the older sibling of a friend whom I thought lives an enviable lifestyle, I got into the habit of putting on -- while I was working -- a YouTube stream that played music. I made sure, however, that it was only devoted to the mellowest and least distracting of hip hop beats.

I thought here at least I was emotionally safe. But Satie invaded my musical sanctum. One of the wordless, cool, mild and unnamed pieces this channel supplied suddenly had an eery familiarity. I realized what it was—they were sampling the Gymnopédie. It was unmistakable—albeit set to a new pulsing beat.

And tonight it happened again.

Of all my many affectations, perhaps the most recent is my purchasing of a small Victrola record-payer, and the accumulation—from the surprising number of Cambridge-area stores devoted to defunct media technologies—of the rudiments of a classical vinyl collection. (It's amazing how cheap such records are these days—probably because the music they contain is even cheaper, i.e. free, on the internet; but there is something so much more fundamentally satisfying about listening to such pieces on a record!)

Here, among the familiar symphonies and tone poems, I surely know what I am getting. It will be soothing stuff, not the kind of music to grab you up and manhandle you emotionally.

I put on a record by Satie that appeared to mostly be devoted to the music of his ballet Parade (the one that figures memorably in John Berger's book on Picasso, since the latter did the set design and costuming for the ballet's original performance). This piece consumed most of Side A. But toward the end of it, a different Satie came on. It was the haunting Gymnopédie.

The version the record played was the one Debussy orchestrated, and it simply broke my heart; far more than the unaccompanied piano version can do. Well, the evening is shot now, I said. Whatever I was thinking about before is going to have to be abandoned and replaced by listening to this sad and strange little song over and over again.

I simply cannot hear this piece without being thrown into melancholy. This is due in part no doubt to the intrinsic qualities of the "douloureux" piece itself, but also—I maintain—to the fact that I always listened to it, as a kid, when my mom was practicing at the piano in the late afternoon, when the body's daily energy is at its lowest ebb, and the mind is particularly receptive to depressive influences.

For whatever reason though, this piece is associated for me with a more than ordinary sadness. "Cosmic sadness" V.S. Naipaul would have called it—as he once termed in a letter the black moods that overtook him as a child. Gerard Manley Hopkins, that great poet of sheer and terrifying melancholia, would have dubbed it "wórld-sorrow." It is a frighteningly overpowering feeling. Yet it has, like all sadness, an indescribable sweetness. One does not want it to stop—one nurtures it, in fact, when it comes—even though it is a form of pain.

I try as an adult not to dwell in such moods, the way I often did as a teenager and young adult - despite the fact that, or perhaps because, such moods are seductive. This is part of the reason, no doubt, that I listen to music far less often now than I used to at those younger ages. Indeed, I'm often not sure in what direction the arrow of causality points. Did I stop listening to music because I am no longer as inclined to depressive moods as I used to be? Or did dropping the habit of listening to music make me a less depressed person?

For whatever reason, sometime about my mid-twenties, the feelings of melancholy that periodically beset me in my teenage years and early-twenties almost completely came to an end. I still experience sadness, anger, anxiety, frustration, anguish, boredom, and all the rest of the human emotions. But true depression is something else. "Wórld-sorrow," "cosmic sadness" is something else. I know what it is, because I have felt it. But, for whatever mysterious reasons, I do not feel it now.

When I hear this Gymnopédie, I am reminded of those earlier times. And I realize, with fear, that the potentiality for all those emotions still exists within me. But it is not only with dread that I regard them. They have a depth and reality to them that the hectic emotions of my adult life, the constant rushing, the fear of failure and the desire for success, do not possess. Listening to Satie I am briefly and safely able to return to a different and in some ways more profound stage of my life—one that was more lent et douloureux.