Redtree Times

On the Blue Side— At the West End Gallery

gnossienne- n.– A moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.

–The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I don’t have much to say this morning.  I just wanted to share a little music from the French composer Erik Satie, someone whose work has always spoken to me in its elegant spareness.  It was a great influence on some of my earliest works.  In fact, I even titled an early piece or two after the composer, but I can’t locate the images at this point.

Thought I’d share his Gnossienne No. 1 as played in this fine video from the contemporary Italian pianist/composer Alessio Nanni.  The word gnossienne was created by Satie.  He sometimes created new terms or appropriated terms from other fields to describe his compositions.  Gnossienne is generally thought to simply denote a new form although I like the definition at the top from the website The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.  It seems to fit the composition very well.

Anyway, give a listen to Satie’s beautiful sounds this morning.

I am short on time this morning, so I thought I’d rerun the simple short post above that I have shared a couple of times over the years. The only difference in these posts is the accompanying painting. I chose On the Blue Side at the top because it had that same sense of an inner life that people that know you will never truly know. Its title was also taken from a song, one from the Steeldrivers, the bluegrass group that once featured Chris Stapleton, who sings on that track. A much different feel than this Satie piece but no less applicable to the painting.

After all, trees and people are complicated, filled with mystery and contradiction…