Origami Odyssey. Peter Engel

Pelleas and Melisande, Debussy wrote, “Explorations previously made in the realm of pure music had led me toward a hatred of classical development, whose beauty is solely technical . . . I wanted music to have a freedom that was perhaps more inherent than in any other art, for it is not limited to a more or less exact representation of nature, but rather to the mysterious affinity between Nature and the Imagination.”

      Working nearly in parallel with Debussy, Satie was exploring the balance of stasis and movement in his own piano pieces and songs and undermining the seriousness of the Germanic tradition by marrying his profound mysticism to an absurdist sense of humor. He provocatively titled a set of piano compositions Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear to prove to his close friend Debussy that his music really did have form. (Pointedly there are seven, not three, pieces in the collection.) The same Zen-like mind later produced Vexations, which consists of a single musical theme repeated 840 times. Satie’s “white music” and Zen utterances would eventually inspire the aleatoric, chance-inspired music of the American composer John Cage, who with a team of pianists first performed Vexations seventy years after it was composed, in a performance that took over 30 hours. Satie’s deliberate disconnect between the name given to a piece of music and the music itself recalls the paradoxes evoked by Escher’s reptile and Hokusai’s magician, calling into question which is reality and which illusion.