I love the title overlay: The Weirdest Composer. Well, there’s plenty of competition for that title, but Erik Satie is certainly in the running.

No matter how hard you study, and practice, and tinker around, you have to be somewhat nuts to come up with anything really original. This piece of music still sounds profoundly beautiful and strange over a hundred years after it was written. It must have sounded like it was from Saturn when he first tried it out.

He got thrown out of music school for being lazy. When he tried again later, his teacher had this to say about him:

“Insignificant and laborious” and Satie himself “Worthless. Three months just to learn the piece. Cannot sight-read properly”

Outsiders are always like that. Like Themistocles once said: “I cannot fiddle, but I can make a great state from a little city.”