My Year in Music — 2022

Three French Artists, Two Pianists, One Symbol

Anthony Draper
7 min readDec 28, 2022

This past year, I have transitioned to writing on Substack. You can subscribe to my writing there at A Reasonable Doubt and read this article for free, along with many others.

My year in music has been defined by three different artists. All of them French. But you’d never know that just by listening to them.

They’re all fairly different, too. But there is something that connects them all (other than them being French). They are:

  • The Gnossienes by early 20th-century composer Erik Satie
  • PLANET by Sofiane Pamart
  • Random Access Memories by Daft Punk
Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash

Gnossienes by Erik Satie

These are a small collection of songs composed for piano by Erik Satie, an early 20th-Century composer. More famously, he is the composer of the Gymnopedies, some of which fit the description of classical music most people recognize, without necessarily knowing the name, who its by, or where they’ve heard it before.

Both the Gymnopedies and Gnossienes share quite a lot of similarities — especially compared to his other work — but it’s the gnossienes that really got under my skin this year. I probably listen to them at least four times a week…

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