SATIE went through a crisis of creative confidence in the early twentieth century which prompted him to enrol in the Schola Cantorum in 1905 as a mature student. His friend Debussy strongly opposed the decision: ‘At your age’, he said, ‘a leopard doesn't change his spots.’ While the first decade of the twentieth century is creatively a lean period for Satie, the techniques he learned at the Schola fed into his later music – and, unexpectedly, performances of his early works promoted by Ravel and others from 1911 made him more notorious than he had ever been. His music from his Schola period to the end of his life is multimedia, often collaborative, and marked both by his studies and by contemporary innovations. Satie contributed to many of the small-circulation art magazines of the period and was closely connected to the most innovative writers, composers and artists of his age. The knowingly modern turn of the new century, with its shiny new technology and inventions, resonated with Satie. The Italian futurist movement also had a high profile in Paris in the early twentieth century, communicating its ideas through multiple manifestos.

Innovation affected the creative world of Satie and his contemporaries, not least by giving rise to a consciously modernist movement which prized new, distinctly urban, sounds. In the first two decades of the twentieth century in Paris, cutting-edge music was indivisible from the other arts, especially literature and visual art. We encounter poets and musicians responding both to older mechanical instruments such as the barrel organ and to electricity, shiny newness and factories. However, the poetic themes of banality and the everyday – the relationship between the human being and the machine – remained constant, whether the machine were a barrel organ, a typewriter, an engine or a siren.

Satie's music should also be considered in the context of the many interart ideas and movements in Paris in the 1910s, many of which centred on Montparnasse. When, in this period, slum-clearance projects in Montmartre changed the character of the area, Montparnasse became more attractive as a meeting place.