If you've ever listened to YourClassical's Peaceful Piano or Relax streams, there's a good chance you've heard Erik Satie's Gymnopédies. As a matter of fact, if you've ever listened to any playlist, CD, record, or tape promising "relaxation," there's a good chance you've heard this music.

What, exactly, makes Satie's three piano pieces so entrancing? Why have generations kept coming back to them? It's appealing music, certainly — but it's also unique, in a way that's made it at once highly popular and highly influential.

Among the repertoire's great composers, Satie wasn't exactly a prodigy: when the boy entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1879, his teachers were decidedly unimpressed by his technique and work ethic. He left and came back in 1885 (then age 19), with the same result. Three years later, he published the first of these now-famous piano compositions.

The Gymnopédies may seem the height of refined relaxation today, but in their time they were deeply subversive. They defied classical harmonies and structures, in keeping with the composer's generally iconoclastic spirit.

The pieces' title came from a made-up profession Satie invented for himself when asked what his occupation was. "I am a gymnopedist," he said. The word was highly esoteric — and the following year, Satie gave that title to three short piano pieces. What is a gymnopedist? One who writes the Gymnopédies, of course.

The pieces were accompanied by a piece of verse written by Satie's friend J.P. Contamine de Latour, and it remains unclear whether the poem or the music was written first. The word "gymnopédie" appears in the poem, and had previously been identified by Rousseau as a piece of music to which young Spartans danced naked.

By avoiding any conventional term for the pieces (sonatas, préludes, etc.), Satie cut himself loose from any preexisting restrictions on what, exactly, they would be. The same approach applied to Satie's other pieces, and he experimented with avant-garde compositional touches like directing that his piece Vexations be played 840 times in a row.

Satie argued for French composers to throw off the heavy mantle of German Romanticism, making him a critical influence on the evolution of 20th-century music in his home country and beyond. In 1898, Debussy published an orchestration that brought an impressionistic touch to bear on Satie's music, illustrating a facility for achieving great effect with spare, spacious instrumental color.

John Cage was a passionate fan of Satie's, and through Cage as well as other mid-century figures, Satie helped provide the template for what we now call "ambient music." Cage was particularly drawn to the proto-conceptual aspects of Satie's work: the endless repetitions, the floating structures.

Cage seized on Satie's concept of musique d'ameublement, a French term often translated as "furniture music" — in other words, background music. The idea of music not meant for the foreground wasn't new (Haydn, for example, knew darn well his chamber music wasn't always going to command rapt attention), but Satie deliberately structured some of his compositions to be repetitive and unobtrusive, while substantial enough to have more of a presence than a ticking clock.

The ambient music of Brian Eno, the entire genre of new age music, and vast swaths of electronic music spanning genres owe a debt to Satie. Meanwhile, as Satie's aesthetic was becoming increasingly influential, the Gymnopédies were proliferating through popular culture in their own right. Blood, Sweat & Tears won a Grammy for their 1968 interpretation.

The Gymnopédies also featured in movies including The Royal Tenenbaums and My Dinner with Andre, where the piano pieces soundtracked Wallace Shawn's contemplative cab ride through New York City. Combining historical resonance with a distinctly contemporary flavor, composed by a musician's musician, the Gymnopédies perfectly captured the film's searching and pained, yet sophisticated, tone.

Simple enough for a child, sophisticated enough for a brainy independent film, the Gymnopédies today are music for all occasions — except, ironically, a dance party.

Editor's note: Dan Wascoe, a retired Star Tribune columnist, first interviewed Lorie Line in 1990 during her Dayton's department store days. For the past 11 years, he has performed as a pianist with vocalist Baibi Vegners as Nuance.

When Lorie Line began playing solo piano in Dayton's department stores 30 years ago, she resolved "to learn new music all the time" for her hourlong shows — 28 hours a week at stores in downtown Minneapolis, Edina and Roseville.

Reason: "I wanted the employees to like me."

Since then she's learned many more lessons — musical, commercial, culinary, even horticultural — that helped her build a business and fulfill a dream, surviving tough times along the way. And her audiences seem to like her just fine. She's become part of many families' holiday traditions and earned a place in the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame.

This year she is wrapping up her 29th holiday tour through seven mostly Midwestern states accompanied by her husband, Tim (who doubles as Santa Claus), a five-member chamber orchestra, a vocal soloist, personal assistant, sound engineer, bus and truck drivers, crates of brightly sequined and fur-trimmed gowns, shoes to die for, dozens of cast costumes, elaborate sets and props, cases of merchandise (including handbells and CDs) and her own grand piano imprinted with her name in gold.

Before embarking on this year's 31-day, 28-venue tour — ending Dec. 23 — she and her musicians staged four more intimate concerts in her villa-like home in Orono, Minn., where her window-wrapped, elevated living-room stage overlooks Forest Lake.

Those at-home listeners — up to 50 at a time — hear Line's latest program before it hits the road, and each 75-minute performance is followed by dessert and coffee. She admits that "my home is my favorite venue and favorite stage."

On the road, her troupe performs before thousands of fans, including many who make her show part of their holiday routine. She prepares post-performance dinners for her musicians because most shows last late into the evenings. (Her crew members take turns doing dishes.)

The journey concludes on New Year's Eve back home in Orono, where the musicians perform and Line cooks dinner for 50 guests, including some from distant states.

"I'm a fabulous cook," she says.

The rest of the year, the Lines tend their music-centered business: composing, selecting and arranging songs, designing costumes, filling CD orders, recording another CD and publishing music books of her piano arrangements. She also does many solo piano performances: 30 last year.

Along the way, she has produced two fundraising specials for PBS and says she has sold or distributed more than 6 million CDs, about half from a promotion of her holiday music on Chex cereal boxes.

If all this qualifies as stardom, it did not burst suddenly into a supernova. But its core has remained constant — what the star calls the Lorie Line sound.

"I have an incredible way of phrasing," she declared. "It's a lyrical way of breaking up the notes. It has a line to it" that is geared to performance rather than to accompanying voices or other instruments. "It's kind of a rolling, pretty sound — somewhat simple but well thought out. Nobody can do it quite like me. It's unique and never boring. My gift is writing and arranging."

She has learned that her artistic tastes and styling appeals primarily to women 25 to 35.

She attributes those gifts to God, whom she calls "the Master," reflecting a strong spiritual undercurrent to her shows. The last two have been titled King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Line begins each year researching and trying out music for the next CD and tour.

"I play songs out of books. If they're pretty or I can make them pretty, things I think I can do well," they might end up in her repertoire. "But if they're awkward or klutzy, I pass."

Last August she began charting arrangements for each song and each musician in her chamber orchestra: cello (Randall Davidson), oboe (Megan Dvorak), percussion (Caitlin Lucic), trumpet (Mitch van Laar), bass (Ethan Yeshiva) and vocalist Moriah Huerta. By late October, after recording each part in her home studio, she sent the recordings and sheet music to her players.

They had 10 days to review and begin memorizing the material before beginning rehearsals on Nov. 5. Ten more sessions followed, each lasting three hours. After each one, Line continued practicing three tunes with the cellist and bass … they play as a trio during the show.

While husband Tim is a vital part of the business team and cast, Lorie is the head Line at rehearsals and performances.

At rehearsals, she focuses on fine points of the ensemble's performance, sometimes repeating a passage half a dozen times to master the nuances. She listens to but does not always accept suggestions from her colleagues. She rules on issues of staccato and legato, tempo (regal and royal or fast and furious), finishing flourishes, and even choreography; which foot the musicians should begin with during a procession and precisely when an instrumentalist should stand and sit during a solo. During one such session, oboist Dvorak joked she felt like a "whack-a-mole."

Harking back to her Dayton's decision to stay musically fresh, Line said that despite 29 tours, she never repeats a tune exactly, although she might add a few tweaks: "I'm on my fourth arrangement of 'O, Holy Night.'"

Born in Phoenix, Ariz., Line began piano lessons at 5. Although her grandmother played stride-style piano to accompany silent movies, Line met her only twice. No one else in her family, including her two adult children, plays an instrument professionally, but Line learned to play by ear and earned a degree in piano performance at the University of Nevada, Reno.

After meeting Tim on an airplane, they courted for four months before marrying in 1986. After he landed a job with Josten's and they moved to Minnesota, she did office work for a construction company.

Her piano job at Dayton's from 1988 to 1993 led her to record a holiday album, Sharing the Season. After that, she said, "There was no going back." It wasn't long before she began plotting her first holiday tour.

Her list of tour cities varies.

"We drop and add different cities every year," she said. "Some cities get added back in perhaps every two or three years. It is all about routing, affordability, turnout and how we feel."

This year's additions were Waconia and New Ulm, Minn., Eau Claire, Wis., and Volga, S.D.

The largest performance venue this year is the Chester Fritz Auditorium in Grand Forks, N.D. (2,800 seats). Others include Denver, Sioux Falls, S.D., Des Moines and Lincoln, Neb., plus auditoriums and theaters in the Twin Cities area. Line has dropped Blue Earth, Minn., where "we can't get [attendance] past 500 seats."

Three members of her chamber orchestra have stayed with the tour for several years, but this year Line added percussionist Lucic and trumpeter Van Laar, whom she recruited after hearing him perform on a cruise ship. Tim Line remains as a veteran Santa, bellmeister and master of ceremonies.

Each holiday show is a sensory melange of elaborate robes and gowns, lighted trees, crosses, banners, candelabra, bell-ringing by the audience and the ever-popular "12 Days of Christmas" with kids in animal costumes that Line and company bring for them. Connecting them all are holiday songs that Line meticulously arranges, note by note.

Like most touring entertainers, the Lines can tell stories of mishaps.

Lorie recalls an episode in Detroit Lakes, Minn., where she hung her dress on an overhead sprinkler backstage before the show. That triggered an unscheduled deluge that soaked her dress and hairdo, requiring an emergency makeover from a beautician in the audience.

This year, during a performance in Burnsville, kids from the audience were helped as usual into costume by Line's crew to perform "12 Days of Christmas." But as her assistant Michele Van Beek wrote later in an online review: "Those naughty elves must have snuck in and sprinkled glue all over the stage before the show causing the Lords of Leaping to get stuck. Santa will have to have a talk with them!"

The annual tour generates about 50 percent of the Lines' revenue, while sales of her piano arrangements bring in 20 percent, CD sales 10 percent, and fees from digital downloads and streaming services most of the rest, Tim said.

Line said she expanded into music publishing after fans told her, "I want to play like you." She has issued more than 50 books of sheet music and released 44 CD albums.

As her music enterprises expanded, the Lines' revenues peaked at more than $4 million in about 2000. They decided to build their Orono villa in 1996.

But their lives changed with the Great Recession that began in 2007 and with rapid changes in the music business.

Stores such as Musicland closed, cutting into CD sales. Music consumers shifted toward digital listening and purchasing. Tour ticket sales declined. With revenues cut by about 50 percent, the Lines sold an office building and "sold everything we did not need on eBay," Lorie said. "We did not go out to dinner for a year."

But they never lost their treasured house on the lake, despite inaccurate reports that it had been sold through foreclosure.

"We did try to sell for $3.9 million," she said, but her heart wasn't in it. "I wanted to stay here."

Looking back, the period from 2008 to 2012 was "the lowest time in my whole life," she said. "We had to reinvent ourselves. We simplified."

The tour's chamber orchestra shrunk from 12 musicians to five. The costume budget hemorrhaged from $150,000 to $20,000.

She began recording music at home instead of using outside studios. They consolidated offsite warehousing space into their garage and rented out the first house they owned. They also began doing their own gardening: "I learned to drive a tractor," she said.

They also learned to use computers to sell their tour tickets, CDs and music books and to do their accounting. They switched from buying newspaper advertising to placing ads on Facebook.

"I never took a business class," Line said, "but we began figuring out ways to put [our products] out there."

At 60, Line says she's never been happier, despite the annual high-pressure crescendo of bringing all the pieces together. Drawing on her spirituality, she said she's learned to take nothing for granted.

"I don't ever see myself retiring," she said. "Nothing else would be as pleasing to me."

But she would like to continue rebuilding their revenue stream to continue the lifestyle she enjoyed in flush times.

That prospect seems in reach, she said, because after 30 years in the business and 29 years of touring, "I know how things sell."

We have curated classical music playlists on YouTube to help you feel better after the stresses of the day, including our latest collection of peaceful piano music. And don't miss Peaceful Piano, the new 24/7 stream on YourClassical.org.

Want more music to help you relax or study? Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Tracklist

00:00:00
Robert Schumann
Scenes from Childhood: No. 7: Dreaming
Tamas Vasary, piano

00:02:23
John Field
Nocturne No. 1 in E-Flat Major
Benjamin Frith, piano

00:06:11
Gabriel Faure
3 Romances sans paroles: No. 3 in A-flat Major
Jean Martin, piano

00:08:54
Claude Debussy
Suite Bergamasque: III. Claire de Lune
Francois-Joel Thiollier, piano

00:14:01
Ottorino Respingi
Ancient Airs and Dances: II. Villanella
Konstantin Scherbakov, piano

00:18:15
Sergei Rachmaninoff
10 Preludes, Op. 23: No. 10 in G-Flat Major
Idil Biret, piano

00:22:22
Erik Satie
3 Gymnopedies: No. 1
Klara Kormendi, piano

00:25:01
Johannes Brahms
Piano Sonata No. 3: II. Andante espressivo
Idil Biret, piano

00:35:09
Maurice Ravel
Le Tombeau de Couperin: V. Menuet
Francois-Joel Thiollier, piano

00:39:24
Alexander Scriabin
Piano Sonata No. 3: III. Andante
Bernd Glemser, piano

00:43:33
Claude Debussy
2 Arabesques: No. 1
Francois-Joel Thiollier, piano

00:48:38
Peter Tchaikovsky
Album for the Young: No. 21: Sweet Dreams
Idil Biret, piano

00:51:10
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Sonata No. 8 "Pathetique": II. Adagio cantabile
Jeno Jando, piano

00:55:51
Robert Schumann
Scenes from Childhood: I. Of Foreign Lands and Peoples
Jeno Jando, piano

00:57:23
Edvard Grieg
Lyric Pieces, Book 5, Op. 54: No. 6: Bell Ringing
Marian Lapsansky, piano

01:01:04
Maurice Ravel
Sonatine: II. Mouvement de Menuet
Francois-Joel Thiollier, piano

01:03:54
George Frideric Handel
Keyboard Suite No. 2: I. Adagio
Philip Edward Fisher, piano

01:06:55
Peter Tchaikovsky
12 Morceaux, Op. 40: No. 2: Chanson Triste
Ilona Prunyi, piano

01:10:08
Johannes Brahms
6 Piano Pieces: No. 5: Romanze
Idil Biret, piano

01:14:04
Claude Debussy
Preludes, Book 1: No. 8: The Girl with Flaxen Hair
Klara Kormendi, piano

01:16:03
Maurice Ravel
Menuet sur le nom d'Haydn
Francois-Joel Thiollier, piano

01:17:45
Franz Schubert
Piano Sonata No. 13: II. Andante
Jeno Jando, piano

01:21:53
Johannes Brahms
16 Waltzes, Op. 39: No. 15 in A-flat Major
Idil Biret, piano

01:23:28
Johann Sebastian Bach
Goldberg Variations: I. Aria
Pi-Hsien Chen, piano

Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc.

In an era when music programs are being cut from schools and software has made instrumentation cheaper and more accessible, people aren't rushing out to buy acoustic instruments.

In 2000, 105,000 new pianos were sold in the United States. In 2009, only 30,000 new pianos were sold. Composer, pianist and Steinway & Sons artist Chad Lawson is trying to revive interest in the piano by modernizing it for what he calls the "Spotify generation." Lawson created his latest album Re:Piano armed with his instrument and an iPad full of digital effects.

Lawson says that since the 1700s, listeners have had the same notion of what the piano is supposed to sound like, and that popular music doesn't often sound like that anymore. He says that a lot of the millennial generation hasn't been exposed to piano the way older generations have.

"They haven't really grown up with a piano in the house, or if they have, they don't know how to turn it on," Lawson says. "I wanted to say, 'Hey, let's take something like the piano and let's put some new paint on it. Let's give it a new voice.'"

On tracks like "All Is Truth," Lawson creates piano patterns, then loops them with the iPad and uses effects that create tinkling, metal sounds in the background. He layers his loops to create an ethereal texture that obscures and transforms the instrument from its origin.

Unlike his traditional songwriting process of creating chords and then a melody, Lawson says composing Re:Piano was more improvisational. His live performances of the album are that way, too.

"When I walk out on stage with the iPad, I start with a pattern. It's something that I've not prepared," he says. "I just build upon that." He compares the improvised result to a dish on the reality cooking show Chopped.

"I love limitations," he says. "That's the great thing about it. You have just this to work with. What can you do?"

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit npr.org.

When Fanny Mendelssohn was born, her mother, Lea, was reported to say she had "good Bach fingers." Lea went on to teach Fanny and her younger brother, Felix, how to play piano.

On this week's Learning to Listen, you'll hear from composers and performers who learned piano from their mothers before moving on to conservatories and other studies, in honor of Mother's Day.

Program Playlist

Fanny Mendelssohn
The Year: August
Sarah Rothenberg, piano
Arabesque 6666

Edvard Grieg
Two Melodies
Norwegian Chamber Orchestra
Iona Brown, conductor
Virgin 45224

Sergey Prokofiev
Juvenilia: Allegro in F, Scherzo in D major, Waltz in G minor, Fugue in D major
Frederic Chiu, piano
Harmonia Mundi 907191

Felix Mendelssohn
String Quartet no. 5, 4th movement
Emerson Quartet
DG 3888

Mily Balakirev
Islamey
Yefim Bronfman, piano
Sony 60689

Bela Bartók
First Rhapsody for Violin & Piano
Shank-MacLaughlin duo
Centaur 2440

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Fantasia in D minor
Glenn Gould, piano
Sony 52627

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Each day throughout July, I'll share with you a piece of classical music. Thirty-one days, thirty-one pieces.

The list is by no means definitive, nor is it necessarily a list of all of my favorite music from the classical world. Every morning, I start my day with music that inspires me in some way, whether I'm inspired by its happiness, its loneliness, the instrumentation, the harmony, the colors, the melody — each piece is special in some way — and offers an opportunity to either hear something you've never heard, or hear something new in a piece you've known your whole life.

Day 11: Frederic Chopin, Berceuse in D-flat major

Like yesterday's post, I offer a gorgeous gem of piano that has some unique twists and turns within it. Of the hundreds of choices Frederic Chopin has to offer, I find this "simple" Berceuse in D-flat major fascinating. My ears giggle with joy at the somewhat random chromaticism (dissonance, crunchiness). If you can pick out the left hand, it does the same thing more or less through the entire piece, while the right hand has the most joyous party. All those ninths!

Take the 31 Days of Classical Challenge

31 Days is a bite-sized month-long trial of Classical Music from across the spectrum of the wonderful, expansive music we love at Classical MPR. Join the fun by subscribing to the 31 Days of Classical newsletter, or use #31DaysofClassical on Twitter or Facebook.

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