Gymnopedie Nº 1 by Erik Satie Piano Solo - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.1853953

The Gymnopédies (Trois Gymnopédies "Three Nude Dances"), are three piano compositions written by French composer and pianist Erik Satie.

He completed the whole set by 2 April 1888, but they were at first published individually: the first and the third compositions were published in 1888, while the second wouldn't be published until 1895.

The work's unusual title comes from the French form of gymnopaedia, the ancient Greek word for an annual festival where young men danced either naked or, perhaps figuratively, simply unarmed. The source of the title has been a subject of debate.

Satie and his friend Alexis Roland-Manuel maintained that he adopted it after having read Gustave Flaubert's novel Salammbô, while others see a poem by J. P. Contamine de Latour as the source of Satie's inspiration, since the first Gymnopédie was published in the magazine La Musique des familles in the summer of 1888 together with an excerpt of Latour's poem Les Antiques, where the term appear.

Gymnopédie No. 1:

The First Gymnopédie is marked Lent et douloureux (slow and mournfully).

Its steady 3/4 meter music falls into to nearly identical halves, with an accompaniment that sets up a regular rhythm (short-long, short-long) in the first bars and then veers from that rhythm only at the very end of each half.

Atop this gently swaying background is a melody of the most peculiarly expressive kind; its quarter notes are translucent, its longer notes somehow hollow at their center.