Erik Satie’s ‘Chanson’ is the first of his Trois autres mélodies, written in 1887. This arrangement, for voice, vibraphone and tape by Caitlin Rowley was commissioned by American composer Adam Di Angelo and completed in 2009. The tape part uses recordings from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara (with permission) as well as environmental sounds recorded in Ealing (London) and Brussels by the composer.
Not wanting to greatly change the beauty of Satie’s original music, the aim was for the tape part to underscore the feelings of fleeting pleasures, and the melancholy aspect of J.P. Contamine de Latour’s text, while the vibraphone and voice present the melody and accompaniment almost unaltered from the original.
The score comes with a CD of two versions of the tape part: one with and one without the vibraphone part, enabling either easy solo practice for the singer, or performance when a vibraphone may be difficult to come by.