From his emergence as the Bohemian 'gymnopediste' of fin-de-siecle Montmartre to his encounters with the Dada movement after World War I, composer Erik Satie famously flaunted convention, His reputation as an avant-garde provocateur, however, has left him relegated to the status of a precursor in a musical landscape ruled by Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky; in this standard interpretation, his influence trumps his innovations, But in this new biography, Mary E. Davis reveals that interpretation to be an incomplete view: Satie's modernist aesthetic, she shows, was born of the real-world contradictions that informed his life.<BR>Satie proposed a new music based on the consistent contact of everyday elements and rarefied genres and forms. A whimsical calligrapher and irreverent essayist, here drew the boundaries of art,devising new expressive modes based on the intersection of words, visual art and music. His contacts in the world of high fashion significantly shaped his aesthetic views and prompted him to develop a modernist music that was relevant, witty and pleasurable. This new style was 'Neoclassicism', and contrary to conventional opinion, Satie rather than Stravinsky was its first significant proponent.<BR>Satie's offbeat sartorial sensibilities are legendary - it was his penchant for velvet suits in the 1890s that earned him the enduring nickname 'The Velvet Gentleman'. This book reveals the ways in which Satie harnessed the power of nascent celebrity culture, and illuminates the profound aesthetic links between couture and culture. It demonstrates the importance of fashion to the rise of musical modernism and properly positions Satie in the centre, rather than at the margins, of this major shift,