Erik Satie

Eric Alfred Leslie Satie, better known as Erik Satie, was a French composer and pianist who lived from 1866 to 1925. The son of a French father and a British mother, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire but was undistinguished there and did not obtain a diploma. In the 1880s he worked as a pianist in cafe-cabarets in Montmartre and began composing works, mostly for solo piano, such as his Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes. He later entered the Schola Cantorum as a mature student, and from about 1910 he became the focus of successive groups of young composers attracted by his unconventionality and originality, among them the group known as Les Six.