Ratatouille Satirique

It was only after Satie’s death in 1925 that the manuscript of the piano piece Jack in the Box was recovered. Satie himself thought he had lost the manuscript in a bus. When his flat in Arceuil was cleaned out, a small notebook was discovered behind his piano and it contained the manuscript which was assumed to be lost forever. The Rêverie (De l’Enfance de Pantagruel) is an extract from Trois petites pièces montées, originally composed for small symphony orchestra. In this suite it is meant as a restful intermezzo. It is clear that, as with Milhaud (La Création du Monde) and Debussy (Golliwogg’s Cakewalk; Le Petit Nègre), it is hard to deny obvious influences of jazz music in Erik Satie’s compositions. Le Piccadilly, dating from 1904, displays a lot of similarities with the compositions of Scott Joplin.