Erik Satie (1866-1925) was a quirky, innovative and enigmatic composer whose impact has spread far beyond the musical world. As an artist active in several spheres - from cabaret to religion, from calligraphy to poetry and playwriting - and collaborator with some of the leading avant-garde figures of the day, including Cocteau, Picasso, Diaghilev and René Clair, he was one of few genuinely cross-disciplinary composers. His artistic activity, during a tumultuous time in the Parisian art world, situates him in an especially exciting period, and his friendships with Debussy, Stravinsky and others place him at the centre of French musical life. He was a unique figure whose art is immediately recognisable, whatever the medium he employed. Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature explores many aspects of Satie's creativity to give a full picture of this most multifaceted of composers. The focus is on Satie's philosophy and psychology revealed through his music; Satie's interest in and participation in artistic media other than music, and Satie's collaborations with other artists. This book is therefore essential reading for anyone interested in the French musical and cultural scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

This is the largest selection, in any language, of the writings of Erik Satie. Although he was dismissed as an eccentric by many, Satie has come to be seen as a key influence on modern music. The appeal of his writings, however, go far beyond their musical value. He is revealed as one of the most beguiling of absurdists, in the mode of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, but with a strong streak of Dadaism (a movement with which he collaborated).

Verdi, Wagner, polymorphous perversion, Puccini, Brunnhilde, Pinkerton, and Parsifal all rub shoulders in this delightful, poetic, insightful, sexual book sprung by one man's physical response to the power and exaggeration we call opera. Sam Abel applies a light touch as he considers the topic of opera and the eroticized body: Why do audiences respond to opera in a visceral way? How does opera, like no other art form, physically move watchers? How and why does opera arouse feelings akin to sexual desire? Abel seeks the answers to these questions by examining homoerotic desire, the phenomenon of the castrati, operatic cross-dressing, and opera as presented through the media. In this deeply personal book, Abel writes, ‘These pages map my current struggles to pin down my passion for opera, my intense admiration for its aesthetic forms and beauties, but much more they express my astonishment at how opera makes me lose myself, how it consumes me.’ In so doing, Abel uncovers what until now, through dry musicology and gossipy history, has been left behind a wall of silence: the physical and erotic nature of opera. Although Abel can speak with certainty only about his own response to opera, he provides readers with a language and a resonance with which to understand their own experiences. Ultimately, Opera in the Flesh celebrates the power of opera to move audiences as no other book has done. It is indeed a treasure of scholarship, passion, and poetry for everyone with even a passing interest in this fascinating art form.

The hero, Monsieur, is a successful young executive in Paris whose daily life is examined with precision. He is nothing if not unremarkable. Here, he muses on everything from the night sky to a Rotring pen. And he is very funny.

No stranger to the art of staging and to the act of disclosure, Sophie Caile returns again here to the theme of autobiography and to the notion of the Other, revealing in all their difference and singularity those who have been blind since birth or who have gone blind following an accident. By establishing a dialectic between the testimonies of several generations of blind people and the photographs taken by her on the basis on these accounts, Sophie Caile offers readers a reflection on absence, on the loss of one sense and the compensation of another, on the notion of the visible and the invisible. In this publication, she revisits three earlier works constructed and conceived around the idea ofblindness, setting up a dialogue between them; in Les Aveugles (The Blind), created in 1986, she questioned blind people on their representation of beauty; in 1991, in La Couleur aveugle (Blind Colour), she asked non-sighted people what they perceived and compared their descriptions to artists musings on the monochrome; La Dernière Image (The Last Image), produced in 2010 in Istanbul, historically dubbed the city of the blind, gives a voice to men and women who have lost their sight, questioning them on the last image they can remember, their last memory of the visible world. The work, which is structured as an introspective triptych, uncovers sensibilities, perceptions and events that are painful, sincere. Sophie Calles idea is to underline the permanence and irony of a particular situation, with the aim of redeeming and highlighting the importance of sight.

Erik Satie remains one of the most bizarre figures in music history, yet everything he did has its own curious logic, once it can be perceived. In this important new study Dr Orledge reveals what made Satie 'tick' as a composer, dealing with every aspect of Satie's complex career and relating his achievement to the other arts and to the society in which he lived. Almost every figure in contemporary art was involved with Satie in some way or another, from Matisse and Picasso to Apollinaire, Cocteau and Brancusi. This, however, is no mere life-and-works study but rather an exploration of the technique behind Satie's art, which foreshadowed most of the 'advances' of twentieth-century music from serialism to minimalism, and even muzak. As the book progresses Satie appears as far more than just the composer of the popular Gymnopédies and Parade.