The early morning air prickled at Oluwande’s skin as he unlocked the front door to the coffee shop. The custodian, Mr. Buttons – a tall, thin older man with stringy, graying hair and a thick Scottish accent – was always there before him, standing and watching the sky, where just the tiniest hint of light played at the horizon.
Saw that post where someone zoomed in on Stede’s bed in ep 10 and said it looked like it had been slept in and the pillows arranged like someone had been hugging them. To me it’s too grainy to really see but the thought of it has me sobbing because that was the first time Ed ever slept in that bed. He had probably laid awake so many nights on the couch or the floor, thinking about what it would be like to crawl into that bed and curl up with him. And when he finally does get to sleep in it, in probably the fanciest bed he’d ever slept in, with a soft mattress and silk sheets and too many pillows and a heavy down blanket, he’s all alone except for the smell of Stede, so he hugs the pillows to pretend while his heart is breaking.
Gnossienne No. 5, composed by Erik Satie in 1889, is Ed and Stede’s theme. It’s played at each of their important moments throughout Our Flag Means Death. When you listen to the piece in full, it’s like someone keeps starting the piece and messing up a little so they start all over again, and each scene experiments with a different instrument during a different segment of the piece, like flute or harpsichord. It remains tentative but each time it’s a little more hopeful, a little more determined, a little more wistful. Ed and Stede are revealing little bits of themselves to each other, checking in and reaching out towards each other’s vulnerabilities and offering safety, exploring what they mean to each other. But the base notes, their connection and chemistry, always stay a steady anchor. The whole piece is a bit sloppy and giddy and all over the place yet always comes back to the same notes and the same progression. They can’t quite place their finger on what’s happening so the music can’t resolve in a satisfying way, but each time it becomes clearer and more complete until the end of the song which is played during the scene where they kiss and they’ve finally figured out how to play all the notes and it’s beautiful. It’s like this culmination of everything the performer has been trying to communicate and finally gets right- but it’s still cut a bit short.
I’ve talked before about how often the show is in conversation with creative works that signal shifts towards modernism, which is apt for a show that famously and hilariously plays with time periods and shifting 1717 up with anachronistic modernisms. It’s true in its references to literatureandpainting, and it’s true of music as well. Satie was experimental for his time, taking inspiration from impressionist painters like Monet who endeavoured to create reflections of the ordinary and the real that were non-static and moving, in both senses of the word. He’s sometimes described as the spiritual father of minimalism, whose compositions @unadulteratedkr calls “subversive in its relative simplicity.” While giving me some context for Satie, she told me that while his notations indicate that performers should leave room for poetry in their expressions of the music, he insisted the tempo remain modéré, meant at the tempo of the human heart. The bohemian was a truly hopeless romantic who proposed to the painter Suzanne Valadon on their very first night together. He wrote her songs and she painted his portraits, and when she left him after 5 months, he was so devastated that he wrote of being left with “nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness.” She was supposedly his only ever known love affair.
Gnossienne No. 5 dovetails OFMD’s minimalist approach to romance, where the sweeping and swelling feeling of falling in love is left to speak for itself in its understated, clumsy simplicity. The piece is experimental in the way that the show is experimental, stripping the queer love story down to its rawest most basic components without being weighed down by oppressive forces or grand expectations. It allows for comedy and lightheartedness and the experimental nature of becoming friends to lovers. It’s their song through and through. I’m sure we can expect it to play at their wedding, and we will all dutifully cry our eyes out.
Here’s a link to a recording
They played this on ClassicFM today and it made me so happy.
Gnossienne No. 5, composed by Erik Satie in 1889, is Ed and Stede’s theme. It’s played at each of their important moments throughout Our Flag Means Death. When you listen to the piece in full, it’s like someone keeps starting the piece and messing up a little so they start all over again, and each scene experiments with a different instrument during a different segment of the piece, like flute or harpsichord. It remains tentative but each time it’s a little more hopeful, a little more determined, a little more wistful. Ed and Stede are revealing little bits of themselves to each other, checking in and reaching out towards each other’s vulnerabilities and offering safety, exploring what they mean to each other. But the base notes, their connection and chemistry, always stay a steady anchor. The whole piece is a bit sloppy and giddy and all over the place yet always comes back to the same notes and the same progression. They can’t quite place their finger on what’s happening so the music can’t resolve in a satisfying way, but each time it becomes clearer and more complete until the end of the song which is played during the scene where they kiss and they’ve finally figured out how to play all the notes and it’s beautiful. It’s like this culmination of everything the performer has been trying to communicate and finally gets right- but it’s still cut a bit short.
I’ve talked before about how often the show is in conversation with creative works that signal shifts towards modernism, which is apt for a show that famously and hilariously plays with time periods and shifting 1717 up with anachronistic modernisms. It’s true in its references to literatureandpainting, and it’s true of music as well. Satie was experimental for his time, taking inspiration from impressionist painters like Monet who endeavoured to create reflections of the ordinary and the real that were non-static and moving, in both senses of the word. He’s sometimes described as the spiritual father of minimalism, whose compositions @unadulteratedkr calls “subversive in its relative simplicity.” While giving me some context for Satie, she told me that while his notations indicate that performers should leave room for poetry in their expressions of the music, he insisted the tempo remain modéré, meant at the tempo of the human heart. The bohemian was a truly hopeless romantic who proposed to the painter Suzanne Valadon on their very first night together. He wrote her songs and she painted his portraits, and when she left him after 5 months, he was so devastated that he wrote of being left with “nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness.” She was supposedly his only ever known love affair.
Gnossienne No. 5 dovetails OFMD’s minimalist approach to romance, where the sweeping and swelling feeling of falling in love is left to speak for itself in its understated, clumsy simplicity. The piece is experimental in the way that the show is experimental, stripping the queer love story down to its rawest most basic components without being weighed down by oppressive forces or grand expectations. It allows for comedy and lightheartedness and the experimental nature of becoming friends to lovers. It’s their song through and through. I’m sure we can expect it to play at their wedding, and we will all dutifully cry our eyes out.
Can I interest you in some severe pain? Stede does a little laugh as it cuts back to Ed. They were planing theIR LIFE TOGETHER I’M GOING TO FUCKING BLACK OUT FUCK THESE TWO FOR REAL I HATE THIS SHOW
