Satie's Gymnopédie No. 3. All three were written in 1888, when Satie was twenty-two, and each carries a different instruction at the head: No. 1 is "slow and painful," No. 2 is "slow and sad," and this one is "slow and solemn." Six years later Debussy orchestrated two of them and swapped the order, putting this one first. Sixty bars, and the shortest note lasts almost a second. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
When Debussy orchestrated them, he put the third one first
In 1888 Satie was twenty-two and playing piano in a Montmartre cabaret. That year he wrote the three Gymnopédies, and on the scores he gave himself a title that was not "composer" but "gymnopédiste" — a word he invented.
At the time almost nobody noticed them. It was Debussy who carried them outward: in 1896 he orchestrated Nos. 1 and 3 for orchestral performance. Those are the two he chose, and he swapped their order — the published orchestral No. 1 is Satie's No. 3, and the orchestral No. 2 is Satie's No. 1.
Debussy left no explanation for the swap. What is on record is that the two were friends by then, and that Satie had had almost no opportunity for formal performance in the preceding decade.
The difference between the three sits entirely in one line at the head of each: "slow and painful," "slow and sad," "slow and solemn." Satie did not mark any of them happy. The word gymnopédie comes from ancient Greece, where it named a festival dance performed naked by young Spartans.
One bass note a bar, and a melody in no hurry above it
The left hand does one thing from beginning to end: it puts down one bass note a bar, holds it, and changes to another in the next. That is the whole accompaniment.
Above it the melody moves extremely slowly. A note hangs for nearly a second before the next arrives, and long gaps sit between phrases. Those gaps are part of the piece, not a wait for something.
The harmony never resolves. A chord stops there, the next step is obvious, and it simply does not take it — waiting until you have stopped expecting anything before changing to another that also does not resolve. So the piece is neither sad nor happy; it is just present.
In the middle the melody drops very low and the bass drops with it — the darkest bars in the piece, darker than anything in No. 2. Then it climbs back and the opening returns as it was.
In the last bars there is less and less, and both hands settle in the bass. Nothing is ever loud, and nothing here will take your attention away from what you are doing.
Sixty bars, and the same stretch walked twice
Sixty bars, 3/4, three hundred and forty sounding notes — fewer than six a bar on average.
Bars 1 to 4 are accompaniment only: the bass alternates between two notes and the melody has not arrived. It enters at bar 5 and runs to bar 14.
At bar 15 the whole thing drops: the bass reaches G1, the lowest point in the piece, and the melody sinks with it. This stretch, to bar 26, is where the harmony travels furthest.
From bar 27 the entire opening returns — its bar-by-bar note counts and ranges almost identical to those from bar 1. At bar 43 the passage from bar 15 comes round again.
From bar 55 there is a coda, and in the last two bars both hands settle in the bass.
The shortest note lasts 0.952 seconds — the score moves slowly enough that a first-time reader will not lose it.
The difficulty is time, not fingers
Few notes, small spans, no fast figuration — the hands find this easy, and it is playable early. Everything hard about it is time.
First, the gaps. Long rests sit between phrases and they have to carry weight. Too tight and it sounds like a memory lapse; too loose and it breaks.
Second, the bass. One note a bar, every one at the same volume, every one holding until the next. Any unevenness in the left hand and the floor of the piece moves.
Third, do not speed up. The heading says slow and solemn, and the slowness is the thing to hold.
Fourth, the low middle section. Too much pedal there turns to mud; change more often than elsewhere.
The tempo is the 63 to the quarter printed on the score, and the finished video runs two minutes fifty-five.
We rate this 2 out of 5.
The other two of the set, and the pieces with the strange titles
Nos. 1 and 2 are both already on this channel: the first is the famous one, and the second has the most obvious rocking bass. Heard together, the three turn out to use one method with the weight placed differently each time.
The six Gnossiennes come from the same years, written without bar lines or time signatures, with instructions like "like a toothache" and "open your head" printed on the page.
For more harmony that never resolves: Debussy's Clair de lune, L. 75, also on this channel.
