Night - On the " Furniture Music " brings to the surface, on Satie's music, the emotions of the people who lived each life. I am interested in the possibility of a new chemical reaction, if the "furniture" of Satie's music can be further highlighted.
I hope that, with modern French music and literature, there will be something that melts away from the heart, and that it will be what Proust called "happiness".

Night - on the "Furniture Music"
Risako Fukagai　

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Programme

Erik Satie: Gnossiennes No. 1　
Maurice Ravel: Noctuelles
Claude Debussy: Ondine
Francis Poulenc: Hymne

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Programme Notes

The music is full of contradictions, yet it is strangely satisfying. I can't help feeling that there is a heart in it.

The music, which refuses to be "deliberately heard", was created "to be always present". The experimental "Furniture Music" became one of Satie's most important ideas. It is perhaps one of the most unusual philosophies in music or in art.
It is at once hypnotic and intense, accessible and incomprehensible.
One might snicker at a life unaware of the music that blends into everyday life, and pity a life that is aware of it. Either way, Satie provokes us and stays with us.

If our lives are based on something that is as comfortable and natural as a piece of furniture, then it is possible to project onto Satie's music the emotions of the people who lived them. If we can make Satie's "furniture" stand out even more by doing so, we may be able to see a new chemical reaction. It was this interest that led me to the present work.

I have chosen to focus on the "human" moments of daily life, the most vulnerable and least seen of all, and to extract stories from the "night".
"Night" has been used by many poets as a metaphor for "suffering" and "sorrow". It is also a metaphor for suffering and sorrow, emotions that are so small that they are usually overlooked. But if we live without venting them, they can form a frozen heart without us even knowing it.
I have always thought that it is in these small details that humanity lies. I hope that music can bring about a melting sensation, a "dizzying happiness" as Proust called it.

For the music that emerges from the "Furniture Music", we have chosen pieces by Ravel, Debussy and Poulenc. All of them are representative of modern French music.

"Noctuelles" depicts the sorrow of a prostitute. Like the woman depicted in Manet's painting "The Bar at Folies Bergère", Paris at this time may have appeared to be a glamorous world, but like a fiction in a mirror, it was a world that was "left behind". Of course, this may be true today as well. Many of us have had the experience of seeing the world as if we were suddenly looking through a glass.
The work is often translated as "moth", but if we think about the sorrow of a woman wrapped in a veil, we can see the decadence of modern France and the temperature of humanity.

There are many interpretations of "Ondine". It can be seen as a demonic being. But for me, it seems that anyone can become an Ondine. The sorrow, the pain, the anger, the resignation and the madness. Happiness does not come from obsession, but in Ondine's case, if she misses that "one", she is doomed to lose both herself and her partner. We, who have the freedom to choose and to live according to our own will, have to think about what happened to Ondine, who was not given this freedom.

The "Hymne", with its prayers and light, is "accessible" music, with popular melodies. Poulenc was also a man busy with a love affair that was difficult to accept. The monodrama "The Human Voice", based on Jean Cocteau, was a painful reflection on Poulenc himself. Sung by a lone soprano, it depicts a call with a man who has betrayed her, followed by her ruin. It is the drama of a single night. The Hymn is not doomed, it is music that lives on. We are reassured by the harmonies of light that are so majestically constructed.

The video quotes Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Bertrand, Rimbaud and Proust from French literature, which is inseparable from modern French music. We believe that, like the "Furniture Music", it will always be there to add color to our days.