Finally he writes directions and indications over measures in the score which cannot but be a malicious though delightful mockery of modern music in general. Remembering Scriabin’s _Avec une céleste volupté_, or _une volupté radieuse_, _extatique_ or _douloureuse_, one is not surprised to find Satie telling one to play _sur du velours jaunie, sec comme un coucou, léger comme un œuf_, though at this last one may well suspect a tongue in the cheek. But Satie goes much further than this. There is among the _Descriptions automatiques_ one on a lantern, in which we are here told to withhold from lighting it, there to light, there to blow it out, next to put our hands in our pockets. And throughout the absurd, unless they be wholly ironical, pieces inspired by _Embryons désechés_, there is almost a running text which cannot but stir to hearty laughter. Think of being directed to play a certain passage like a nightingale with the toothache--_comme un rossignol qui aurait mal aux dents_; or of being reminded as you play that the sun has gone out in the rain and may not come back again, or that you have no tobacco but happily you do not smoke. Such are the remarks which Satie intends shall illumine your comprehension of his music; and his humor is the more delightful because as a matter of fact Mozart’s first minuet is hardly more simple than this music to dried-up sea-urchins. Such naughty playfulness may well offend the conservatories; but even if it is only nonsense, surely it is a felicitous sign in these days, when high foreheads and bald pates ponderously try to further the gestation of a new art of music. * * * * * If we leave our study of pianoforte music with a laugh it is only because we may be supremely happy in the possession of so much music that need not be hidden before the raillery of any wit, no matter how sacrilegious. Into the hands of Claude Debussy we give the art of writing for the pianoforte. His is the wisest and most sensitive touch to mold it since the day of Chopin. Whatever the music he writes may be, it has conferred upon the instrument once more the infinite blessing of a proper speech. He has once more saved it from a confusion of thumps and roars.