On the occasion of the centenary of the death of Erik Satie (1866–1925), the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, in collaboration with the Nuova Consonanza Festival, is dedicating an entire day to one of the most original and fascinating composers of modernity.
On Thursday, December 11, 2025, the public is invited to an immersive and extended experience in which music, words, and images intertwine to explore the poetic, ironic, and prophetic complexity of Erik Satie, a key figure in twentieth-century musical thought and a precursor of minimalism and conceptual experimentation. The day's focus is the complete performance of Les Vexations, a work composed in 1893 and structured around a short 16-bar musical phrase repeated 840 times. The performance, lasting twelve uninterrupted hours, will be performed by pianists Carlo Benedetti and Isenarda De Napoli, who will alternate on the 20th-century Pleyel Debussy piano, part of the Villa Medici collection and recently restored. The audience is free to attend the performance, coming and going, and being immersed in music that challenges the perception of time and invites slow, profound listening.
In parallel to the music, the Grand Salon also hosts continuous readings from Notebooks of a Mammal, aphoristic and surreal texts that convey Satie's ironic and visionary perspective on the world. The pieces, translated into Italian by Ornella Volta and published by Adelphi in 1980, offer a verbal and intimate counterpoint to the structural rigidity of Les Vexations.
In the Salon des Pensionnaires, the day is enriched by the Chambre d’échos, a sound and literary installation created in collaboration with the Bibliothèque publique d’information of the Centre Pompidou. This space invites visitors to explore the traces Satie left in contemporary music through imaginary conversations, sounds, texts, and works inspired by him. This immersive environment highlights the relevance of his thought and its dialogue with 21st-century art forms.
The journey continues in the Salon de Musique, where films related to Satie's life and artistic legacy are screened. These include Entr'acte (1924) by René Clair, a Dadaist film born from a collaboration with Satie himself, and Satan Satie (2016) by Juruna Mallon and Luca Parente, a visual and mental portrait that investigates the voids, silences, and aesthetics of repetition typical of Satie's poetics, through urban landscapes and sound manipulations.
At 6:00 pm, in the Cinema Hall, there will be a presentation of Ornella Volta's posthumous book, Erik Satie en notes et en mots (Presses du Réel, 2025), a monumental biography that brings together decades of studies, insights, and previously unpublished material. The conference will feature pianist and musicologist Jean-Pierre Armengaud, Matteo Celli Volta (the scholar's son), writer and journalist Tiziana Gazzini, and composer and conductor Marcello Panni. It is an opportunity to pay tribute to one of Satie's greatest scholars and to rediscover little-known aspects of his personality and compositional method.
At 8:00 pm, a special screening of Lisa Rovner's Sisters with Transistors (2020) will follow, with the director present. The documentary retraces the extraordinary stories of electronic music pioneers such as Clara Rockmore, Éliane Radigue, Delia Derbyshire, and Suzanne Ciani, revealing how their experiments rewrote the sonic landscape of the twentieth century, deeply resonating with Satie's innovative spirit. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Vittoria Bonifati, director of Villa Lontana. Reservations are required for this screening (free of charge).
Photo: official poster of the event
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