Ex. 1-11: Gymnopédie No. 1

Gymnopédie No. 1 is the first of three slow, quiet piano pieces. Satie wrote it in February 1888, at 21, and finished the other two by early April. The year before, he had left his father's home and moved to Montmartre, the artists' district of Paris. There he earned his living as the pianist of the cabaret Le Chat Noir. The score is marked "Lent et douloureux" (slow and painful).

The piece first appeared in August 1888, as a free supplement to a weekly music magazine for families. It carried the subtitle "Danse antique" (Ancient Dance) and was dedicated to a young woman, probably a fellow student. Satie's father sold insurance and ran a small music publishing business on the side. That year Satie printed the third Gymnopédie at his own cost and sold it from his father's shop. In December he wrote an advertisement for it himself, in a cabaret newspaper, under a woman's name. Letters were arriving from all sides, it said, asking where the works of Erik Satie could be found. The third Gymnopédie, "one of the most beautiful," could be had for a ridiculously low price. "Let the whole world hear of it!"

The word gymnopédie comes from ancient Greek. It was the name of a festival in Sparta where young men danced naked. Satie said he had found the word in Flaubert's novel Salammbô. His friend Contamine de Latour (1867–1926), a poet born in Spain who lived in Paris, used it in a poem, and four lines of that poem were printed above the music. Latour also wrote the words of Satie's first songs. One story says that when the owner of Le Chat Noir asked Satie what his profession was, he answered "gymnopédiste."

At the time nobody paid attention to the pieces. In 1896 Claude Debussy, who had been Satie's close friend for some years, arranged the first and third for orchestra. A conductor who was there later told how it came about. Satie played the pieces at the conductor's house, badly. Debussy sat down and played them again, to show how they should sound. The conductor then asked Debussy to write that down for orchestra. He conducted the first performance in Paris in February 1897. From that concert the Gymnopédies slowly became known.

The version in this app was arranged for solfège practice. It is in C, two semitones below Satie's D. Some notes that the piano holds for several bars were made shorter for singing.

From the album Satie: Avant-dernières pensées by Alexandre Tharaud (2009)
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