Cinema (from „Relâche“)

Erik Satie's "Cinema" was composed in 1924 as film music for René Clair's avant-garde silent film "Entr'acte," which was conceived as an interlude for the Dadaist ballet "Relâche." The work embodies Satie's characteristic aesthetic of simplicity and understatement, which he set against the Romantic excess and Impressionism of his time. With its concise, often repetitive melodies and deliberately anti-sentimental stance, the composer emerges here as a pioneer of musical modernism.

The music follows the surreal film images with a typically Satiean blend of irony and poetic directness. His harmonically simple yet rhythmically precise musical language eschews all forms of pathos, creating instead an almost mechanical but nonetheless expressive accompaniment to Clair's Dadaist visions.

As one of the early examples of composed film music, "Cinema" stands as exemplary of the experimental tendencies of the French avant-garde of the 1920s. Satie, who had already broken new ground with his "Gymnopédies" and "Gnossiennes," demonstrates here his ability to develop an independent musical language for the new medium of film that is both functional and artistically convincing.