Sports et divertissements ("Sports and Pastimes") is a cycle of 21 short piano pieces composed in 1914 by Erik Satie. The set consists of a prefatory chorale and 20 musical vignettes depicting various sports and leisure activities. First published in 1923, it has long been considered one of his finest achievements.
Musically it represents the peak of Satie's humoristic piano suites (1912-1915), but stands apart from that series in its fusion of several different art forms. "Sports" originally appeared as a collector's album with illustrations by Charles Martin, accompanied by music, prose poetry and calligraphy. The latter three were provided by Satie in his handwritten scores, which were printed in facsimile.
Biographer Alan M. Gillmor wrote that ""Sports et divertissements" is "sui generis", the one work in which the variegated strands of Satie's artistic experience are unselfconsciously woven into a single fragile tapestry of sight and sound — a precarious union of Satie the musician, the poet, and the calligrapher...At turns droll and amusing, serious and sardonic, this tiny "Gesamtkunstwerk" affords us as meaningful a glimpse of the composer's subconscious dreamworld as we are ever likely to get."
Background.
The idea for "Sports et divertissements" was initiated by Lucien Vogel (1886-1954), publisher of the influential Paris fashion magazine "La Gazette du Bon Ton" and later founder of the famous pictorial weekly "Vu". It was conceived as an haute couture version of the "livre d'artiste" ("artist's book"), a sumptuous, expensive collector's album combining art, literature, and occasionally music, which was popular among French connoisseurs in the years before World War I. "Gazette" illustrator Charles Martin provided the artwork, 20 witty copper plate etchings showing the affluent at play while dressed in the latest fashions. The title itself was an advertising slogan found in women's magazines of the period, designed to draw tourists to upscale resorts.
An often repeated legend asserts that Igor Stravinsky was first approached to compose the music, but he rejected Vogel's proposed fee as too small. "Gazette" staffer Valentine Hugo then recommended Satie, with whom she had recently become friends. Although he was offered a lesser amount than Stravinsky, Satie claimed it was excessive and against his moral principles to accept; only when the fee was substantially reduced did he agree to the project. According to independent Satie scholar Ornella Volta, a likelier account of the transaction had Satie's young disciple Alexis Roland-Manuel urging him to haggle Vogel for more money. He was furiously scolded by the composer, who feared such demands would cause him to lose the commission altogether. In fact the 3000 francs Satie received for "Sports" was by far the largest sum he had earned from his music up to that point. Not two years earlier he had sold the first of his humoristic piano suites, the "Veritables Preludes flasques (pour un chien)", for a mere 50 francs.
Satie was familiar with the "livre d'artiste" tradition. Some of the earliest examples had been published by the Montmartre cabaret Le Chat Noir while he was a pianist there in the late 1880s. He found in it an ideal format for his unique interdisciplinary talents. "Keep it short" was the only advice Satie ever gave to aspiring young composers, and the necessary restrictions of the "Sports" album - one page per composition - perfectly suited his predilection for brevity. Extramusical commentary was becoming increasingly prominent in his keyboard works of the period, and in "Sports" he indulged this by writing a surrealistic prose poem on each theme; he then meticulously calligraphed these into his India ink scores, in black ink for the notes and words and red ink for the staves. Whether Vogel expected these additional contributions or not, he agreed to reproduce Satie's autographs in facsimile.
There is no record that Satie had contact with Charles Martin or access to his illustrations while composing the suite. Musicologists Robert Orledge and Steven Moore Whiting believe Satie directly musicalized at least one of the pictures, "Le Golf" (the last piece he composed); otherwise, according to Whiting, "one finds a wide range of relationships between music-"cum"-story and drawing, from the close correspondence in "Le Golf" to outright contradiction, with varying degrees of reinterpretation in between." If Satie knew of the images beforehand he evidently did not feel obligated to use them as the basis for his work, and filtered the different sporting themes through his own imagination instead. Thus, again from Whiting, "While the relation of Satie's music to his own texts is quite close, the relation of music to drawing is more elusive."
Ultimately, Martin's 1914 etchings would not be seen by the public for many years. The long-delayed publication of "Sports" led the artist to replace them with an updated set of illustrations after World War I. As Satie's material remained unchanged, the new drawings are connected to the music and texts only by their titles.
As noted on the individual scores, the pieces were completed from March 14 ("La Pêche") to May 20 ("Le Golf"), 1914. Satie delivered them to Vogel in groups of three as the work progressed, drawing part of his fee (150 francs per piece) each time. The "Préface" and introductory chorale may have been tossed in gratis, as they were not part of the original project. Satie would insist on installment payments for all his later big commissions. Conscious of his spendthrift nature when he had money, he used this method to cover his immediate living expenses and save himself from the temptation of squandering his entire fee at once, which had happened in the past.
Music and texts.
Satie's "Préface" for "Sports" describes the work as an amalgam of drawing and music, omitting any reference to his extramusical commentaries and calligraphy. His prose poems are carefully threaded throughout the scores so that they may be read along with - but not easily spoken over - the piano part.
Gillmor observed that "In several of the pieces Satie indulges in a kind of "Augenmusik" wherein the musical score is an obvious graphic representation of the activity being depicted." In others the score is often closely linked to the text - such as in "La Pêche" - and the subtle details may not be perceived merely by listening. Performance of the music alone lasts between 13 and 15 minutes.
Préface
""This publication is made up of two artistic elements: drawing, music. The drawing part is represented by strokes – strokes of wit; the musical part is depicted by dots – black dots. These two parts together – in a single volume – form a whole: an album. I advise the reader to leaf through the pages of this book with a kindly &amp; smiling finger, for it is a work of fantasy. No more should be read into it".
"For the Dried Up &amp; Stultified I have written a Chorale which is serious &amp; respectable. This Chorale is a sort of bitter preamble, a kind of austere &amp; unfrivolous introduction. I have put into it everything I know about Boredom. I dedicate this Chorale to those who do not like me. I withdraw"." - ERIK SATIE
1. Choral inappetissant ("Unappetizing Chorale") - Grave
"Seriously. Surly &amp; cantankerous. Hypocritically. More slowly." In the second half of his "Préface" Satie offered a rare "explanation" of one of his favorite musical jokes. He used the chorale form - that "symbol of Protestant piety and music pedagogy" much employed by Bach - in several compositions to thumb his nose at the academic, the stupid and conformist. Satirical examples are found in his piano duet "Aperçus désagréables" (1908), the orchestral suite "En habit de cheval" (1911), the "Choses vues à droite et à gauche (sans lunettes)" for violin-piano duet (1914), and the ballet "Parade" (in the revised 1919 version). The brief "Choral inappetissant" is built of sour, unsingable phrases that snub the whole purpose of the genre. Here it serves to warn off the serious-minded from the light-hearted frivolity that ensues.
Beneath the date of the score (May 15, 1914) Satie noted, "In the morning, on an empty stomach."
2. La Balançoire ("The Swing") - Lent
"Slowly". Pendulum-like staccato quavers in the left hand underscore four poignant melodic phrases, including a quotation of "L'escarpolette" from Georges Bizet's 1871 piano suite "Jeux d'enfants". Satie's text for this piece is frequently cited as an exemplar of his haiku-like prose poems:
"It's my heart that is swinging like this. It isn't dizzy. What little feet it has."
"Will it be willing to return to my breast?" 
3. La Chasse ("Hunting") - Vif
"Fast". Satie's first-person narrative is one of his most whimsical literary creations, an absurdist nature-setting in which rabbits sing, nightingales hide in burrows, and owls breast-feed their young. As for the hunter, he uses his rifle to shoot nuts out of the trees. This is presented in the typical "hunting rhythm" of 6/8, with bugle fifths in the treble and a concluding gunshot in the bass.
4. La Comédie Italienne ("The Italian Comedy") - A la napolitaine
"In a Neapolitan manner." Scaramouche, a cowardly braggart from "Commedia dell'arte", tries to wax eloquent on the joys of military life. He is mocked with a courtly, ornamented tune that quickly goes awry with displaced accompaniments and ambiguous harmonies. Steven Moore Whiting wrote of this piece, "It is as if Satie had discovered in 1914 the same formula that Stravinsky would apply in "Pulcinella" six years later."
5. Le Réveil de la Mariée ("The Awakening of the Bride") - Vif, sans trop
"Lively, but not too." In this boisterous aubade members of a wedding party arrive to rouse the newlywed bride from her marriage bed. Charles Martin's original 1914 illustration showed the group crudely throwing tomatoes at the bedroom window. The music quotes distorted bits of "Frère Jacques" ("Dormez-vous?") and the military bugle call "Reveille". Somewhere in the tumult, Satie writes, "A dog is dancing with his fiancée."
6. Colin-Maillard ("Blind Man's Buff") - Petitement
"Pettily". Music and text weave a sentimental little drama. In a game of blind man's buff a blindfolded lady approaches a man who has a crush on her. With "trembling lips" he yearns for her to tag him. She heedlessly passes him by. The man's heartbreak is expressed in an unresolved upward arpeggio. 
7. La Pêche ("Fishing") - Calme
"Calmly". "The murmuring of the water in a riverbed" is suggested by a quotation of the Lied "die Lorelei" by Friedrich Silcher, accompanied by a gentle repeating figure. A fish swims up, then another, then two more, accompanied by bitonal ascending flourishes. They casually observe a poor fisherman on the bank, then swim away. The fisherman goes home as well, leaving only "The murmuring of the water in a riverbed." Satie's construction of this piece - the first he composed in the set - is a perfectly symmetrical arch form (A B C B A).
8. Le Yachting ("Yachting") - Modéré
"Moderately. (In half-notes, bass octaves). Legato." A stern ostinato in the lower reaches of the piano summons up a wind-blown sea as it tosses about members of a yachting party. A "pretty lady passenger" is not amused by the rough weather. "I'd rather do something else," she pouts. "Go fetch me a car." The sea ostinato returns to end the piece.
9. Le Bain de Mer ("Sea Bathing") - Mouvementé
"Eventfully". Another Satie seascape, with rushing arpeggios demonstrating that the ocean is not always congenial to casual tourists. A man leads a woman into the surf, cautioning her, "Don't sit at the bottom. It's very damp." Both are struck by some "good old waves", with the lady getting the worst of it. "You're all wet," the man observes. "Yes, sir," the woman replies.
10. Le Carnaval ("Carnival") - Léger
"Lightly". Confetti rains down on a Carnival celebration. Costumed revelers pose and jostle one another, including a drunken Pierrot who is behaving obnoxiously. "Are they pretty?" the text inquires. Satie answers with an ambivalent musical coda - similar to the ending of "Colin-Maillard" - and adds the playing direction "Hold back considerably."
11. Le Golf ("Golf") - Exalté
"Excitedly". In a sketch of a text related to "Sports", Satie described golf as "a sport for mature men who have retired...Old English colonels especially excel at it." Satie kept this idea as the basis for "Le Golf", introducing a colonel dressed in "Scotch tweed of a violent green." He confidently strides through the links, intimidating even the holes in the ground and the clouds in the sky. His march-like theme remarkably prefigures Vincent Youmans' classic