It’s Gustav Mahler’s birthday

Whoops, looks like I jumped the gun by a day

It’s Erik Satie’s birthday. Je m’appelle Erik Satie comme tout le monde.

“I often regret having come into this petty world; not that I hate the world. No . . . I love the world, I love high society and even the demimonde, since I’m a sort of demimondaine myself. But what have I come to do on this Earth, which is so earthly and so earthy? Do I have duties to perform here? have I come here to carry out a mission-a commission? Have I been sent here to amuse myself? to enjoy myself a little? . . . to forget the miseries of a beyond, which I no longer remember? Am I not unwelcome here? What should I say to all these questions? Thinking, almost from the moment of my arrival, that I was doing some good down here, I began to play a few musical airs which I myself had invented. . . . All my troubles stemmed from there.”
-Erik Satie

A great, concise, article detailing Satie’s influence, and role as pioneer of Ambient music.
https://wfmu.org/~kennyg/popular/articles/satie.html

Happy birthday, Bela Bartok

If you listen to nothing else here, at lend an ear at 1:57 of Violin Concerto No. 2 and hear the violin melody sampled on Dr Octagon’s, Blue Flowers. Absolutely beautiful.


These two solo performances from Ivry Gitlis are particularly dramatic

Bartok’s work as an ethnomusicologist, which greatly influenced his own compositions and helped distinguish him from his contemporaries, is traced in this fascinating documentary, The Miraculous Circumstance.