Paris the Impressionist composers who created new works for piano, orchestra, opera, chamber music and other musical forms, stand in particular, Claude Debussy ("Suite bergamasque", and its well-known third movement, "Clair de lune", "La Mer", "Pelléas et Mélisande"), Erik Satie ("Gymnopédies", "Je te veux", "Gnossiennes", "Parade") and Maurice Ravel ("Miroirs", "Boléro", "La valse", "L'heure espagnole"). Several foreign-born composers, such as Frédéric Chopin (Poland), Franz Liszt (Hungary), Jacques Offenbach (Germany), Niccolò Paganini (Italy), and Igor Stravinsky (Russia), established themselves or made significant contributions both with their works and their influence in Paris. Bal-musette is a style of French music and dance that
Choses vues à droite et à gauche (sans lunettes) aside, Satie was painstaking in his efforts to redevelop these old musical forms in modern terms, harmonically and structurally. He rejected the first movement he completed, an untitled 31-bar chorale in G Major, and experimented with several fugue subjects (including a quotation of the folksong "Au clair de la lune") for the "Fugue à tâtons". In his analysis of Satie's composing methods Robert Orledge remarked on "how ordinary his first thoughts often were", and this certainly applies to the "Choses vues". Satie's original order for the pieces - "Fantaisie", "Choral", "Fugue" - would have given the suite a conventional fast-slow-fast