Furniture therapy - Rondo

Manuscript of "In C" by Terry Riley (image source) to be played by any number of musicians using any variety of instruments. Each musician repeats up to 53 melodic patterns with no prescribed tempo or instrumentation. A consistent eighth-note pulse, often played by a single instrument, acts as a metronome to keep the players aligned. Players are encouraged to stay within 2-3 patterns of each other but this is not essential. The piece ends when all players arrive at the final pattern and the piece is allowed to slowly fade out.

Introduction

In the first post in this new miniseries I wrote about some of my attempts to rethink the idea of what therapy is, and some of the interesting places this has taken me to.

One of these has been to think about the parallels between healthcare practice and music.

I came to this after reading a piece about Erik Satie’s Furniture Music and his attempt to break with the tradition of highly structured, narratively rich, often heroic and didactic classical music.

Satie wanted a kind of music that worked best when you talked over it, read a book, or walked the dog while it was playing.

Something in Satie’s approach to classical music resonated with the way I think about modern healthcare.

Like a classical music concert modern healthcare is often performative. It’s often spectacular (have you seen the new series of The Pitt?). It's often highly structured and, thankfully, an infrequent, occasional event in people’s lives.

Furniture music is the antithesis of this. It seeks only to “be part of the noises of the environment… I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself” (Eric Satie, cited in Banville, 2025).

So if furniture music is the antithesis of the heroic classical form, what would be the equivalent for healthcare?

Before trying to answer this, I should probably make the case that furniture music was neither a one-off fad, nor the capricious conceit of one man’s disordered mind. Quite the opposite in fact. Because although Satie’s inventions were dismissed as playful but meaningless whimsy by many at the time, his influence on C20 culture cannot be ignored.

Minimalism

Let us take a brief audit of some of today’s cultural trends that owe a debt to Satie’s furniture music.

You can hear Satie’s influence in modern film music; in the Muzac playing in shopping malls; in meditation and mindfulness practices; in the use of white, grey, brown and pink noise to help people work, sleep and think; in new sound and noise generating apps; as well as new recording techniques for gathering sounds from microorganisms and plants.

In music, Satie shaped the works by non-Western contemporaries like Julián Carrillo, Annea Lockwood, José Maceda, and Else Marie Pade, as well as a generation of minimalist composers like John Adams, Gavin Briers, John Cage, Julius Eastman, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young. Brian Eno drew heavily on Satie to invent the new genre of ambient music, which went on to influence all forms of electronic music from drone to techno, acid house to dub.

Satie, in effect, gave birth to minimalism, a movement in music that drew on both political and philosophical principles.

Politically, minimalism sought to be democratic and emancipatory, challenging traditional hierarchical structures common to classical music, offering instead new ways to think about what music might be. It showed that music could be accessible and inclusive. A lot of minimalist pieces required little musical skill or competence (in this respect it was an early influence on punk).

Minimalism emphasised a collaborative do-it-yourself ethos, taking music out of the hands of the experts in the large institutions and dissolving traditional boundaries between the composer, performer and audience.

Minimalism challenged the conventional notion of what music was. It made use of environmental, found sounds and ambient noises, challenging the belief that music had to be man-made.

It acknowledged the debt owed to pre-modern and non-Western musical traditions, and attempted to re-connect people to the sounds of nature and the world around them. It emphasised an introspective, quiet, meditative attention — an intentional listening — and a humility borrowed from Asian, Arabic, African and Pacific Indigenous wisdom traditions.

‘Yet the music, despite its apparent simplicity and sunny surfaces, turns upon inwardness. All true art is enigmatic, but the art of Satie is an enigma hiding in plain sight’ (Banville 2025)

Minimalism was also a powerful engine for women composers like Maryanne Amacher, Laurie Anderson, Wendy Carlos, Suzanne Ciani, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Daphne Oram, Éliane Radigue, and Laurie Spiegel, who pioneered sound engineering, new recording and composition technologies to challenge the grand myth of the solitary genius white male composer.

Philosophically, minimalism emphasised:

1. Repetition: Like Satie, many of the minimalists used repetition to enhance the pulsing ordinariness of compositions. Phillip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley are especially well known for this. These composers would often design pieces based on short, easy to perform musical phrases, and give the musicians freedom to play these phrases over one another for extended periods of time. In this way, a simple piece of music that could be written on one page of musical manuscript, but each performance of the piece would be unique.

2. Foregrounding the background: In John Cage’s famous 4’33 there is no music at all. The assembled musicians remain silent for the entirety of the piece. Mocked, of course, by many, the piece caused a lot of people to ask what a musical composition could be, and how each ‘performance’ was made unique by the people present. Shuffling feet, car noises outside, coughs and whispers all made for a different performance and forced people to be still, if only for a short while.

3. Phasing and layering: This is another important technique where two identical pieces begin together but very subtly and slowly shift out of phase, returning again at some like a point. Again, the emphasis is on repetitive, slow change and the possibility of endless sound — much like we find ‘in nature’. With its slow gentle phasing, minimalist music makes a virtue out of building interlocking tapestries of sound layers.

4. Graduation: Rather than having a traditional musical structure with regular and often dramatic chops between movements, verses and choruses, minimalist music rejects abrupt shifts, preferring instead subtle and gradual alterations in dynamics, instrumentation and tempo. The goal is for the music not to be jarring or to draw your attention, but to become almost hypnotic and undemanding.

5. Lengthy: A lot of minimalist music takes a long time to develop and plays out over extended periods. Time is sublimated. Ambient, drone, dub and other minimalist pieces can often run over an hour in length with the idea of being to deepen concentration and immersion.¹

6. Arbitrary rules: Much like OuLiPo, minimalist composers often impose arbitrary rules on the way that the work should be performed — perhaps in honour of Erik Satie, who couldn't help but apply whimsical conditions to the performance of his pieces.² The idea here is to break with the narrative tradition of most forms of music which are designed to tell a story. Traditional music has some capacity for variation but only as long as the originally narrative is not disturbed. Minimalism on the other hand throws out the linear narrative and embraces contingence, chance, unique and unpredictable musical outcomes.

With all of this in mind, then, I feel like we’ve arrived at a place where a different kind of healthcare — and a different kind of therapy — might be envisaged. I won’t attempt to do this here, because it will take some explaining, but I’ll try to sketch this out in the next post in the series. I’ll also bring together some links and resources for those of you who want to learn more about the Oceans of Sound that Satie’s little experiment in music produced.

References

Banville, J. (2025). Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman review – the radical lord of light entertainment Link

Toop, D. (1995). Oceans of Sound. Serpent’s Tail.

1. While I was writing this, a friend of mine sent me a link to a review of Satie’s Vexations performed for the first time ever by a single pianist, Igor Levit (thanks Rich). The piece was in the UK’s Daily Telegraph and was titled One piece, played 840 times over 13 hours? Bring it on… To accompany the work ‘well-known performance artist Marina Abramović… concievied a theatrical action to accompany Thursday’s performance. In the pre-concert chat, she gave us a firm taking-to about how we should spiritually prepare ourselves. Don’t cross your legs. Don’t drink beer. Don’t look at your phones. Breathe with me”. Link to accompanying digital article.

2. We should remember too that Satie loved giving obscure names to his pieces. He had works titled Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Dummy, Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, and wrote whimsical instructions for its performers like “To be played with the tips of the eyes”. (From Banville 2025).