Gnossienne No. 3

Background

Gnossienne No. 3 belongs to the first group of three that Erik Satie composed around 1890, when he was in his mid-twenties and playing piano in the cabarets of Montmartre. Like its companions it has a title of Satie's own invention, no bar lines and no time signature, and instead of ordinary expression marks it carries short, whimsical instructions in French, as if Satie were whispering advice to the player.

Satie spent most of his life as an outsider, poor and often overlooked, but younger composers came to admire the plainness of his music. Claude Debussy was his friend for many years, and after the First World War the group of young French composers known as Les Six regarded him as a kind of godfather. Today the Gnossiennes and the Gymnopédies are the best known of all his pieces.

How to practise it

The piece is in two layers that hardly ever change their roles. Below, a low bass note sounds on beat 1 and a soft chord follows; in the opening the bass is A and the chord is A minor, with C, E and A. Above, a slow melody turns around a small group of notes. The usual way to play it is with the left hand taking both the bass and the chord, which means a leap in every bar, while the right hand keeps to the melody.

The melody's colour comes from its scale:

In this arrangement it moves in pairs of repeated eighth notes, ending each phrase on a long note:

Play each pair as a gentle "long-short" rather than two equal knocks: the second note slightly softer, as if it were an echo. Keep the hand close to the keys and let the finger rise only a little between repeats.

Later the bass moves between E and D, and in the middle section the melody begins to run in steady eighth notes up and down a scale from E, with an A sharp in it. Practise that passage hands separately, slowly, with the same fingering every time. Then the opening music returns, and the piece comes to rest on A again.

A plan:

1. Left hand alone, bass and chord, at 40 beats a minute.
2. The melody alone, phrase by phrase.
3. Hands together at 40, then 54, then the full 66.
4. Two bars at a time for any passage that feels uncertain.

Change the pedal on every beat 1, and keep everything soft. The tempo is slow, so silence and long notes matter as much as the moving ones; let each phrase fade completely before the next begins.

The first piece of the set has its own notes on the Gnossienne No. 1 page.