The Sonatine bureaucratique (Bureaucraticsonatina) is a 1917 piano composition by Erik Satie. The final entry in his humoristic piano music of the 1910s, it is Satie's only full-scale parody of a single musical work: the Sonatina Op. 36 N° 1 (1797) by Muzio Clementi.[1] In performance it lasts around 4 minutes.
Satie's modern, irreverent reinterpretations of 18th Century music in this little pastiche have been hailed as a notable forerunner of Neoclassicism, a trend that would dominate Western concert hall music in the years between the World Wars.[2][3][4][5]
^Pierre-Daniel Templier, "Erik Satie", MIT Press, 1969, p. 90, note 9. Translated from the original French edition published by Rieder, Paris, 1932.
^Rollo H. Myers, "Erik Satie", Dover Publications, Inc., NY, 1968, p. 90. Originally published in 1948 by Denis Dobson Ltd., London.
^Patrick Gowers and Nigel Wilkins, "Erik Satie", The New Grove: Twentieth-Century French Masters, Macmillan Publishers Limited, London, 1986, p. 142. Reprinted from "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians", 1980 edition.
^Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall, Clarendon Press, p. 556.