On being asked: why Uspud?

Yesterday I gave a paper at the conference Music and the Arts in France – 1925: Anniversaries and Confluences at the University of Leeds. My paper was on Erik Satie’s Uspud, and was basically a shortened version of the article I published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. It went down well, and it was a particular pleasure to encounter Oliver Vögel who wrote this very interesting book on Satie (in German) which I had not encountered before. His paper on Satie’s contribution to Dada was terrific.

Anyway, I was asked the same question twice, once by Oliver in conversation and once in front of everybody as part of the Q&A after my presentation. The question was: why are you interested in this? The more formal question framed it in relation to all my other works which, as was pointed out, are rather wide-ranging and diverse. Uspud is a very specific thing. Despite writing a substantial section on it in his book, Oliver said I was “brave” to tackle it, since it is still rather recondite.

The answer I gave was a bit of a mess, really. I talked about how as a teenager I had first encountered the piece and had been immensely struck by the “jump cut” that occurs when the Christian Church is accompanied by a big C major chord which is immediately undercut by a sullen low octave E flat. I said there was something important there linked to alchemical and hermetic writing, but that it had taken me several decades to figure out what it was. And it was, I explained, rather personal: I identify with it.

What I didn’t say, mainly because I didn’t want to get sucked into a big discussion about myself during a musicology conference, was that of course it relates very directly to autism. Uspud had made sense to me as a teenager because it was written in a language I already inhabited. The piece operates with a kind of stubborn literalism. It leaps from event to event without the connective tissue other composers spend their lives perfecting. It repeats cells with ritualistic intensity, eschewing narrative conventions. It is an odd mixture of solemnity and absurdity. It has an impregnable private logic. All of this is, if not autistic, then certainly legible through autistic modes of perception.

For many neurotypical colleagues, interests are framed as strategic or contextual. You like X because it fits with Y, or you study A because it complements B. But for autistic people things attach themselves to you and stay put. They become lifelong companions whether or not they fit into anything. Uspud is one of those things. I was not “brave” to tackle it – it was a compulsion!

In retrospect, what I might have said in Leeds is that my work on Uspud is an example of a research position that comes from inside rather than outside. Musicology traditionally values distance: the analyst stands apart, surveying the terrain. But for me, Uspud is not just an object of study – it is something like a perceptual home territory. To analyse it is partly to analyse the way I naturally experience the world, with all the abrupt transitions, intensity of detail, oscillations between solemnity and silliness, and logic that is obvious on the inside and opaque on the outside.

None of this means the piece is “about” autism, nor that Satie was autistic (though that question is for another day). What it does mean is that there are other ways of encountering music that are shaped by autistic perception, sensory patterning and affective reasoning. These can illuminate things conventional analysis misses. In the case of Uspud, it took me forty years to discover that the reason I cared about the piece was the same reason I had recognised myself in it as a young student.

Maybe what I should have said was not a story about alchemy or hermetic symbolism (true though those are), but something simpler, like: I’m interested in this because it always made perfect sense to me and it has taken a lifetime to understand why.