Anyone who has watched his concert films has seen him stand up and dance while one of his musicians is taking a solo, turning in circles and seemingly lost in his own world. Monk, too, was well known for eccentric, sometimes even bizarre behavior. He was, in the words of the Irish saying, ‘dead, but he won’t lie down.’ ” (1) He was, on the other hand, said to be warm and charming, though intensely devoted to his music. For him scandal was both deliberate and inevitable in that it sprang from his uncompromising manner of following his own bent, of ignoring what was expected of him, and of burning his bridges behind him. As Roger Shattuck relates in The Banquet Years, Satie cultivated his eccentricity: “t is as if Satie turned his career into a series of scandals in order to complete the record of escapades that had distinguished his Montmartre days. Two of the greatest composers for piano in the 20th century (though admittedly Erik Satie began in the 19th) were both also noted eccentrics.
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