SotD - Satie with Trombone and Theremin
In a random piece of ad-hockery that she's sneaking in under the heading of Song of the Day, Susan Omand has made a discovery...
Song of the Day on AlbieMedia started out as being new music that we thought you ought to know about. Then we started to have a little fun with it - favourite tracks from back in the day, theme weeks, our trial of next year's #NotBaconBits and so on. You'll find them all here.
But today I want to get back to new music. Well, new old music as this is a reworking of Erik Satie's Gnossiene no 1, composed in the late 19th Century. Satie's coining of the word "gnossienne" was one of the rare occasions when a composer used a new term to indicate a new "type" of composition. Satie had, and would use, many different made up collective names for his compositions; for example, "ogive" had been the name of an architectural element until Satie used it as the name for a composition, the Ogives, but "gnossienne" was a word that did not exist at all before he used it. It is believed by many to be a homage to his involvement with the religious Gnostic sect, who believed salvation could be achieved through the accumulation of secret knowledge - I guess much like unlocking achievements in a computer game...
All I know is that it's a beautiful piece of music made even more wonderful with the addition of a theremin and a trombone. I found this video last night on Youtube by the Italian group Decostruttori Postmodernisti. Watch this.
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