Erik Satie ate only white foods, bought seven identical velvet suits and wore them daily, and founded a church with himself as its sole member. This episode looks past the eccentricity to find a deliberate disruptor who cleared the way for modern minimalism. Born in Normandy in 1866, Satie lost his mother young, discovered Gregorian chant through a local organist, and was pushed into the Paris Conservatoire by a stepmother he despised. Branded the laziest student in the school and expelled, he later gave himself bronchitis by standing bare-chested in the winter cold to escape the military.

We follow him into Montmartre and the Chat Noir cabaret, where he invented the job title gymnopédiste before writing the Gymnopédies, befriended Claude Debussy, and launched a satirical church that published attacks on his critics. We cover his only known ...