Most, though not all, of Satie’s output was written for the piano. Satie was one of those relentlessly individual turn-of-the-20th-century French artists, musicians and intellectuals who gave us our modern misconceptions of how such people should behave. His training included two mostly unsuccessful enrolments as a student of performance and composition at the Paris Conservatoire, and a brief stint in the army (to escape which he deliberately contracted bronchitis). Thereafter he began to compose, even working for some time as official composer to a breakaway Rosicrucian group led by Sâr Joséphin Péladan (who sported the titles ‘Imperator’ and ‘Super Magician’). However, Satie also enjoyed productive associations with the intellectual and artistic elite of the day, including Maurice Ravel, Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. It was an enduring practice of Satie’s to provide guides to performance in the form of amusing annotations to the scores of his musical compositions. These verbal notes had a degree of popularity independent from the music itself; in the end Satie had expressly to discourage the growing practice among performers of reading them aloud. Upon his death, his mourning friends discovered a number of unknown compositions in Satie’s room in the Arceuil district of Paris. In 27 years of residence there, he had had no previous visitors.