Gymnopédie No. 1

A "gymnopédiste" in Montmartre

At the end of 1887, a twenty-one-year-old pianist introduced himself to the owner of the Chat Noir, the most famous cabaret in Montmartre. His profession, he announced: "gymnopédiste". The word didn't exist, and his Gymnopédies hadn't yet been published. Erik Satie had a gift for a turn of phrase, and he kept it all his life: as a tempo marking, he wrote here "Lent et douloureux" (slow and painful).

The three Gymnopédies date from 1888. The first appeared that same summer in a magazine, La Musique des familles, next to an excerpt from the poem "Les Antiques" by his friend J. P. Contamine de Latour. Did the poem inspire the music, or the other way around? Nobody knows.

The title comes from ancient Greece: the gymnopaedia was a festival in Sparta where young men danced naked (in Greek, gymnos means naked). Satie never explained his choice.

At first, the Gymnopédies remained little known. In 1897, his friend Claude Debussy orchestrated two of them, the first and the third, swapping their numbers along the way. Today, Gymnopédie No. 1 is one of the most played piano pieces, from films to commercials.

Two swaying chords

It all starts with a sway. In the left hand, a low bass note on the first beat, then a chord on the second, held through the third. Only two chords alternate: G major 7 (G, B, D, F-sharp) and D major 7 (D, F-sharp, A, C-sharp). They are chords IV and I of D major, with a seventh that makes them float: the whole mood of the piece is there.

The melody then comes in, slow, almost always moving by small steps, above this swaying that never stops. In the middle, the harmony clouds over with minor shades (F-sharp minor, B minor, E minor), then everything calms down again.

Satie wrote the piece in two almost identical halves: the second repeats the first, and only the ending changes, darker, to finish in D minor. In the library's file, this shared part is written out only once, followed by its two endings: the map therefore counts 47 bars, and the ending in D minor takes up bars 41 to 47. At the piano, play the shared part twice, the second time with this ending.

How to approach it

It's one of the few masterpieces within a beginner's reach: I rate it at the first level, with a 13-day plan. Few notes, a slow tempo… but everything is in the sound.

1. Start with the left hand alone. The leap between the bass and the chord is more than an octave: first work on the movement, without looking at the keyboard, then on the notes. Once the sway is steady, the piece is half learned.
2. Play the two chords as blocks, G major 7 then D major 7, listening to their shade: it's the framework of the whole opening.
3. Sing the melody before playing it: it is long and slow, with held notes that fade away. The secret is to let each note last its full length.
4. Really count three beats: "slow" doesn't mean blurry. Keep a steady tempo rather than a rubato in every bar; the melancholy is already in the notes.
5. Change the pedal with each bass note, on the first beat: it links the bass to the chord without blurring the next harmony.
6. The passages I flag are few: an octave leap in the melody in bar 13, and near the end (bars 42 and 44) chords of four or five notes outside the key, which lead to D minor. Read them slowly, chord by chord.

Two chords to start, a melody that comes back, an ending that changes: it's the ideal piece to learn through its structure, and my plan follows exactly that path, from the map to playing it by heart.