Erik Satie had a way with words. There have been few composers who found such obvious glee in the use of language. In written performance indications appended to his scores, he would ask musicians to play ‘without your fingers blushing’ or ‘on the tips of your back teeth’. Eschdhewing the standard terminology of classical notation – appassionato, agitato, affettuoso, and so on – Satie’s music instead applies expression markings such as ‘white and immobile’, ‘as if you were congested’, and ‘on yellowing velvet’. It’s hard to know quite what to make of these terse little rejoinders. How do you strike a piano key whiteley? Or in such a way that your fingers don’t blush?

Ian Penman, in his rather laconic new book about the composer, Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite, pictures these epigrammatic advisories as ‘images from a reverie, or one-liners issuing from a second bottle of wine’. It’s a line of interpretation that goes back to the composer’s own time, when the mere act of reading his works’ titles in a concert programme was apt to provoke howls of laughter from an audience, prompting some contemporary critics to contemn Satie’s use of language as a ‘distraction’ from the music itself. Penman has no truck with such a separation. ‘His humour is not an eccentric supplement to the “real work,”’ he writes, ‘but intrinsic.’

Other commentators question whether we should regard such textual interventions as gags at all. When I reached out to the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, founder of the group Apartment House who will be performing Satie’s Socrate at this year’s Norfolk and Norwich Festival, he told me he never thinks ‘of anything by Satie as a joke’. The written performance indications, he said, simply serve as a reminder ‘to try to play his music well and with a beauty’. The pianist Mark Knoop agreed. ‘I do take them seriously’, he told me, ‘even if that means with an inner smile.’ For Knoop, ‘it humanises the music somewhat, and makes it quite momentary – as all music should be!’

Perhaps the most notorious textual addition in all Satie’s music appears in the top right corner of a score just a single page long, usually thought to have been written around 1893–1894, but left unpublished during the composer’s lifetime. The work in question is Vexations. It consists of a single eighteen-note theme in no particular key or time signature, repeated with two different sets of chords for accompaniment. It is an odd little melody, especially for the era it is presumed to have been written in – a sort of anti-earworm. What’s even odder is the implication that it should be repeated the best part of a thousand times. ‘In order to play the motif 840 times in succession,’ the text reads, ‘it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.’

Having languished in a drawer for half a century, apparently unperformed, it was disinterred by John Cage in the late 1940s, handed over to him with a wink by Satie’s old friend Henri Sauguet who insisted the piece was no more than a blague. Cage triumphantly brought the score back to America, like a fragment of the true cross, and arranged its first concert outing with a rotating tag-team of performers (including soon-to-be-luminaries such as Philip Corner, John Cale, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, and the choreographer Viola Farber, plus Cage himself). The event, which cost five dollars admission, lasted over eighteen hours, and audience members received a five cents refund for every twenty minutes they sat through. Just one patron made it to the very end (earning just over half his ticket money back for his trouble).

Far more people reached the end when Igor Levit recently performed the piece single-handed at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall (QEH) last April, in an event directed by the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic. When the pianist staggered off the riser after thirteen hours of almost continuous playing (he nipped off stage to pee a couple of times and took some liberty with the work’s only other performance indication – very slow – towards the end), the remaining audience of a 150-odd erupted into rapturous applause that could only be quelled by Levit himself raising a finger for hush in order to promise that ‘no matter what you do, tonight there is not going to be an encore.’ That gave everyone a good laugh.

I’m unsure what Penman would have made of the QEH concert (even less sure what the enigmatic Satie would himself have thought), but I suspect he would at least have appreciated this parting gag. For Penman, Satie belongs in a lineage he dubs popular surrealism – ‘ad-hoc, free-wheeling, up for it’, a sort of jovial cousin to Mark Fisher’s ‘pulp modernism’ – alongside the likes of Spike Milligan, Morecambe and Wise, the ‘off-note piano skits’ of Les Dawson. 

It’s a coinage that’s key to Penman’s argument that Satie is important not in spite of but at least partly because of his wit, his eccentricity, his playfulness with language. I suspect, then, that he would have balked at the general air of self-serious wellness influencer that hangs about Abramovic – as did I, only to be wrong-footed by the discovery that Levit and Abramovic’s evidently tight bond is built on a gleeful currency of bawdy jokes.

Three Piece Suite is a peculiarly slight book which spends a fair bit of time making excuses for its own lack of scholarly erudition and even more time on questionable digressions into the author’s own dreams, peccadilloes, household routines and recent charity shop purchases. But then Penman would argue that Satie’s whole significance is as a patron saint of the miniature, the oneiric and the domestic. There was certainly an element of that in the QEH Vexations. In her introduction, Abramovic encouraged the audience to make themselves at home, come and go as they please – ‘it’s not an Olympic game!’ – and Levit himself donned comfy clothes, even slipped his shoes off from time to time. As the performance wore on, the gesturing of his sometimes-free second hand became increasingly remote and dreamy, as if he were drifting into his own private rapture.

It remains unclear if Satie ever wanted the piece performed in the way people have interpreted it. His close associate Darius Milhaud insisted not, and some recent scholars have suggested that the reflexive noun in that slip of text (not pour jouer but pour se jouer) implies a purely mental exercise. As a thousand memes have reminded us, grammar matters, and Satie was nothing if not punctilious. But I will swear that in his very last go round, with 840 identical sheets of manuscript paper pooling at his feet, Levit found in this ungainly little melody a sublime sort of beauty, a sense of real humanity, and, yes, for all his undoubted exhaustion, a playful little inner smile, too.