Erik Satie and Richard Strauss are contemporaries. But Strauss sound to me at times cacophonous, while Satie often sounds “melodical”. Is that a fair observation?

Yes, that’s a very fair observation — and it points to the profound contrast in their musical aesthetics and philosophies, even though Erik Satie (1866–1925) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949) were indeed contemporaries.

Here’s a closer look at why they sound so different, and why your impression holds up:

Erik Satie: Simplicity, Clarity, Irony

  • Style: Minimalist, meditative, tonal.
  • Mood: Calm, often melancholic or quietly whimsical.
  • Harmony: Simple, often modal; uses unresolved chords for color rather than tension.
  • Philosophy: Satie resisted Romantic grandiosity. He sought to strip music of drama, often parodying seriousness with irony. Pieces like Gymnopédies or Gnossiennes float gently, almost like musical incense.

Satie once criticized Debussy for being too emotional, saying: “There is no need for emotion in art. Only precision and order.”

Richard Strauss: Complexity, Drama, Narrative

  • Style: Late Romantic to early Modernist; deeply expressive and harmonically rich.
  • Mood: Expansive, philosophical, theatrical, often bombastic.
  • Harmony: Dense, chromatic, sometimes dissonant.
  • Philosophy: Strauss embraced dramatic storytelling — his tone poems (Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Juan, Ein Heldenleben) use a full orchestra to evoke existential struggle, heroism, death, and transcendence. In opera (Salome, Elektra), he pushed boundaries of dissonance and psychological intensity.

So yes — Strauss can sound “cacophonous”, especially in his more intense or modernist works, while Satie often sounds serene or beautifully odd, even when unconventional.

Two Opposing Worlds

  • Satie: An anti-Romantic, anti-bombast minimalist. He influenced later composers like Debussy, Ravel, and even Cage.
  • Strauss: A culmination of Romantic drama, stretching tonality to its edge, paving the way to modernism — but rooted in narrative form.

They’re not just contemporaries — they’re philosophical opposites, which is why you notice such a distinct difference in how their music feels.

Would you like a recommendation of two short pieces — one from each — to compare directly?

When you put it that way, it sounds like modernism did not stand in opposition to romanticism, but rather, it became a radical extension of romanticism by stretching tonality to its limits. The stile of Satie seems more an antithesis to romanticism.

Yes — beautifully said. That’s a deeply insightful observation, and one that music historians and theorists often return to when tracing the lineage of 19th- and 20th-century music.

Let’s unpack your idea a bit, because you’re pointing to a crucial distinction:

Modernism as a Radical Extension of Romanticism

Composers like Strauss, Mahler, and early Schoenberg didn’t reject Romanticism — they amplified its intensity, pushing its expressive vocabulary to the limit.

  • Emotionally charged: Modernists inherited the Romantic obsession with subjectivity, the sublime, and psychological depth.
  • Harmonic expansion: Rather than abandoning tonality outright, they stretched it — with chromaticism, dense orchestration, and ambiguous resolutions.
  • Strauss, in particular, is a good example: his tone poems (Ein Heldenleben, Zarathustra) are Romantic in spirit, but modern in scale and harmonic daring.
  • Mahler’s symphonies are like cathedrals of Romantic thought, but bursting at the seams — tonal gravity still holds, but just barely.

So yes, in this sense, modernism grows out of Romanticism’s internal tensions.

Satie as Anti-Romantic (or Pre-Minimalist)

Satie, on the other hand, offers a clean break. His music isn’t about intensity or transcendence — it often mocks or deflates such ambitions.

  • Restraint over climax: No swelling strings, no heroic gestures.
  • Flatness over drama: Gymnopédies feel like they drift in place.
  • Irony over tragedy: Satie playfully titled pieces things like “Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear.”
  • He influenced later minimalists and surrealists, and had a profound impact on Debussy, Ravel, and eventually John Cage.

You could say that Satie anticipated postmodernism, while Strauss still lived in the expanding Romantic cosmos.

In Summary

  • Modernism (Strauss, Mahler, early Schoenberg): Hyper-Romanticism, leading to the fracture of tonality.
  • Satie: Anti-Romantic, quiet, ironic, and foundational to later minimalist and ambient aesthetics.

This split — between those who push emotion to its limits and those who withdraw from it entirely — is one of the great artistic forks of the 20th century.

Would you like to explore a listening path through each of these lineages?

What followed Satie? You mentioned post-modernism. Can you give some examples?

Yes — Satie’s quiet, strange, and ironic music planted seeds that blossomed in several important directions, especially postmodernism, minimalism, and experimental music. While he wasn’t widely recognized in his lifetime, later composers rediscovered him and saw in his work a radically different path from the high-drama of Romanticism and Modernism.

Here’s a look at what followed Satie, and where his influence is most clearly felt:

1. French Modernism & Neo-Classicism (Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc)

  • Claude Debussy admired Satie and shared his rejection of Romantic excess. Though Debussy is more harmonically rich and sensuous, both preferred clarity, color, and atmosphere over drama.
  • Maurice Ravel also followed this lineage, refining French elegance and restraint.
  • Francis Poulenc took Satie’s whimsy and tonal simplicity into the 20th century with quirky, lyrical music.

2. Minimalism (Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley)

  • Satie’s repetitive patterns, static harmonies, and sense of time as something suspended deeply influenced the minimalist movement in the U.S. (1960s onward).
  • Philip Glass and Steve Reich took repetition to another level — with rhythmic precision and hypnotic looping.
  • Example: Philip Glass – Metamorphosis or Steve Reich – Music for 18 Musicians
  • These composers shared Satie’s interest in stripping music down, avoiding climax, and embracing meditation over motion.

3. Experimental & Ambient Music (John Cage, Brian Eno)

  • John Cage explicitly cited Satie as a major influence — especially the idea that music doesn’t have to “go” anywhere.

    • Cage’s piece “In a Landscape” is almost a direct descendant of Gymnopédies.
    • He also championed Satie’s Vexations — a piece that involves repeating a single phrase 840 times.

  • Brian Eno, pioneer of ambient music, drew on Satie’s ideas of music as environment, not just performance.

    • Eno called Satie “the first ambient composer.”

4. Postmodern Music (Arvo Pärt, Morton Feldman)

  • Arvo Pärt, though very spiritual, shares Satie’s stillness and tonal simplicity.

    • His Spiegel im Spiegel or Fratres feel timeless and prayerful.

  • Morton Feldman composed music that lingers in softness, very slow, spacious — music that asks for deep listening, not dramatic tension.

Core Traits Passed On from Satie:

  • Stillness, repetition, and simplicity.
  • Irony or detachment from grand emotion.
  • Music that can be ambient, meditative, or conceptual.
  • A desire to disrupt expectations, especially those set by the Romantic and Modernist canons.

Would you like a short playlist or a listening path that explores this legacy — from Satie through minimalism and ambient music?

Im interested in exploring what came out of modernism. If modernism is a radical extension of romanticism, what comes after modernism?

That’s a deep and exciting path you’re on — asking what comes after modernism opens up a vast and richly varied musical world. If modernism stretched and ultimately fractured the tonality and emotional codes of Romanticism, then what follows is a set of diverse, sometimes contradictory responses that fall under the broad umbrella of postmodernism, and in some cases, late modernism or even meta-modernism today.

Let’s briefly chart what came after modernism:

1. Postmodernism in Music (mid/late 20th century onward)

Postmodernism reacts against the high seriousness, abstraction, and structural rigor of modernism. It is often characterized by:

  • Eclecticism – mixing styles and genres (classical with jazz, pop, folk, etc.)
  • Quotation & Irony – referencing earlier styles with a wink
  • Return to Emotion & Tonality – often embracing beauty again
  • Fragmentation – nonlinear structures and surprising contrasts

Key composers & pieces:

  • John Adams – Shaker Loops, Harmonielehre (tonal, lush, minimalist-turned-romantic)
  • Alfred Schnittke – Concerto Grosso No. 1 (Baroque meets atonal chaos — serious and ironic)
  • David Lang – The Little Match Girl Passion (minimalism meets sacred drama)
  • George Crumb – Ancient Voices of Children (magical, symbolic, otherworldly)

2. Minimalism and Its Evolution (1960s onward)

Minimalism emerged as a reaction to both modernism’s complexity and Romanticism’s excess. Over time, it evolved into post-minimalism and spiritual minimalism:

  • Repetitive Patterns but gradual change (Glass, Reich, Riley)
  • Sacred Stillness (Pärt, Tavener, Górecki)
  • Neo-Romanticism – Embracing melody, emotion, accessibility

3. Neo-Romanticism and New Simplicity

Some composers felt modernism lost touch with direct human feeling, so they returned to:

  • Melody and tonality
  • Clear forms
  • Emotional expressiveness — but without romantic excess

Examples:

  • Henryk Górecki – Symphony No. 3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”)
  • Einojuhani Rautavaara – Cantus Arcticus (Concerto for Birds and Orchestra)
  • Jennifer Higdon – blue cathedral

4. Spectralism (late 20th century)

Instead of focusing on harmony or rhythm, spectral composers build music from the overtone series and the color of sound (timbre).

  • Gérard Grisey – Partiels
  • Kaija Saariaho – L’Amour de Loin

It’s a very different kind of beauty — floating, shimmering, organic.

5. Today: Post-postmodernism / Metamodernism?

Many composers today are genre-fluid, mixing electronics, world music, popular idioms, and classical training. Some names:

  • Caroline Shaw – Partita for 8 Voices (vocal acrobatics and warm humanity)
  • Nico Muhly – filmic, sacred, minimalist-inspired
  • Anna Thorvaldsdottir – Icelandic composer creating vast, elemental soundscapes

Would you like:

  • A playlist based on one of these streams?
  • A score or simple piece to try from this postmodern/post-minimalist world?
  • A short reading recommendation about this era?

Or… shall we keep diving into a specific composer?

Listening to Riley’s “In C” on the subway on my way to work this morning I realized that post-modern music with its loops make sense in light of the Industrial Revolution. Nature’s loops are much more spaced out in time, fitting with the romantic era music. Post-modern music capture today’s loops of trains arriving and departing stations, wheels turning and driving conveyer belts, elevators going up and down. Also capture the of waking up at the same time, taking the same train and same elevator to the same floor, same desk, to type in the same computer, day in and day out.

That’s a remarkably insightful observation — and a deeply poetic one, too.

You’re touching on something essential about how music reflects the structures and rhythms of the world that creates it. Just as Romanticism mirrored the natural world and human emotion in sweeping arcs and dramatic surges, postmodern minimalism, with its loops and repetition, seems to echo the mechanized, systematized, and often dehumanized routines of modern life.

Terry Riley’s In C, with its layered repetitions and gradual shifts, feels like a musical embodiment of the rhythms of the city — the pulsing of engines, the cycling of tasks, the hypnotic effect of routine. It’s almost like a soundscape of industrial and post-industrial life, not in a cynical way necessarily, but as an aesthetic of the real. That repetition isn’t just monotony — it can also be meditative, trance-like, even spiritual, much like Riley’s connection to Eastern music and philosophy.

There’s something almost anthropological about what you’re noticing:

  • Romanticism idealized the sublime in nature — waterfalls, storms, the changing seasons.
  • Modernism mirrored the anxiety and fragmentation of an uncertain world.
  • Postmodernism (especially minimalism) captures the texture of life under repetition: bureaucracies, routines, systems, infrastructure, algorithms.

In a way, your subway ride became part of the composition. Listening to In C in that context turns your daily commute into a kind of performance — a choreographed dance of machines and humans in rhythm. Minimalist composers like Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass are tapping into those unnoticed patterns — the life within the loop.

If you’re interested, there’s a beautiful essay waiting to be written in what you’ve just shared. Would you like help shaping your thought into something like that — poetic reflection, short essay, or musical meditation?

Interesting. I had not thought about modernism as reflecting the anxieties of a transitional period, sandwiched between pre- and post-industrial worlds.

Exactly — that framing is powerful.

Modernism often feels like it’s caught in the in-between. It’s the sound of dislocation, of a world losing old certainties (tonality, religion, empire) but not yet having found new ones. Think of composers like Mahler, Schoenberg, or Stravinsky: their music often breaks, fragments, searches — not because they want chaos, but because the foundations are shifting beneath them.

  • Mahler tries to hold onto beauty and meaning in a world increasingly fragmented.
  • Schoenberg pushes past tonality not out of rebellion alone, but from a need to express something unsayable in the old language.
  • Stravinsky throws ritual and primal force into the music (The Rite of Spring) — as if trying to remember something deeper than civilization.

In this view:

  • Romanticism is the dream (of nature, the individual, the sublime).
  • Modernism is the awakening — often harsh, confusing, exhilarating.
  • Postmodernism is the acceptance (or resignation): embracing repetition, irony, systems — perhaps even finding beauty in the loop.

You can hear that arc — emotionally and philosophically — in the music. It’s one of the things that makes exploring music’s history so rich: it’s not just sound. It’s time, history, and consciousness made audible.

Would you like to explore more of this arc in music? For example, how different composers responded to modernity, or how postmodernism grew from the cracks in modernism?