text: In his neat, calligraphic hand, Satie would write extensive instructions for his performers, and although his words appear at first sight to be humorous and deliberately nonsensical, Nichols and Griffiths comment, "a sensitive pianist can make much of injunctions such as 'arm yourself with clairvoyance' and 'with the end of your thought'". His Sonatine bureaucratique anticipates the neoclassicism soon adopted by Stravinsky. Despite his rancorous falling out with Debussy, Satie commemorated his long-time friend in 1920, two years after Debussy's death, in the anguished "Elégie", the first of the miniature song cycle Quatre petites mélodies. Orledge rates the cycle as the finest, though least known, of the four sets of short songs of Satie's last decade.
  Satie invented what he called Musique d'ameublement – "furniture music" – a kind of background not to be listened to consciously. Cinéma, composed for the René Clair film Entr'acte, shown between the acts of Relâche (1924), is an example of early film music designed to be unconsciously absorbed rather than carefully listened to.
  Satie is regarded by some writers as an influence on minimalism, which developed in the 1960s and later. The musicologist Mark Bennett and the composer Humphrey Searle have said that John Cage's music shows Satie's influence, and Searle and the writer Edward Strickland have used the term "minimalism" in connection with Satie's Vexations, which the composer implied in his manuscript should be played over and over again 840 times. John Adams included a specific homage to Satie's music in his 1996 Century Rolls.