Gymnopédies

• Satie wrote his Gymnopédies in February-April 1888,¹ soon after moving out of his parents’ home in 1887 and into his first apartment, near the Chat noir cabaret.²
  • Satie’s father and stepmother had tried to have him trained as a conventional salon musician, and he hated that. As soon as he let home he got involved in the bohemian arts scene and soon became the conductor of the theater orchestra at the Chat noir.³
  • Satie’s Gymnopédies were among the music he played at the Chat noir.⁴
  • Satie was so invested in his new identity as the composer of the Gymnopédies that he started calling himself, “Erik Satie – gymnopédiste,” before he had even finished writing the set.⁵
• The Gymnopédies are modal and archaic in style. Music like this prompted Debussy to call Satie “a gentle medieval musician lost in this century.”⁶
• Satie claimed the Gymnopédies were inspired by reading Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862), a historical novel set in ancient Carthage.⁷
  • The novel is set after the first Punic Wars. It follows the story of Mathô, a Libyan mercenary, who falls in love with Salammbô, a priestess of Carthage’s moon goddess.⁸
  • The novel’s violence and eroticism scandalized contemporary critics, but also inspired operas (unfinished) by Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff, and artwork by Alphonse Mucha, Rodin and others.⁹
• Another possible source for Satie’s Gymnopédies appears in a contemporary music reference book, Dominique Mondo’s Dictionnaire de Musique. It defines “gymnopédie” as a “nude dance, accompanied by song, which youthful Spartan maidens danced on specific occasions.” The terms was defined similarly in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1768 Dictionnaire de la Musique.¹⁰
• Form: Satie’s innovative structure for his Gymnopédies relied not on thematic development, but rather on a repetition of the same musical ideas in a slightly different perspective in each movement.¹¹

In the Gymnopédies, Satie “takes one musical idea and … regards it briefly from three different directions. He varies … the notes in the melody but not its general shape, the chords in the accompaniment but not the dominant shape.” 

Roger Shattuck, writer on 20^th C. French art and literature¹²

• Claude Debussy orchestrated the 1^st and 3^rd Gymnopédies in c.1896. Debussy conducted his orchestrations in a concert in 1911, and became rather jealous of how successful they were!¹³

1. Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 11.
2. Robert Orledge, “Satie, Erik,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed January 21, 2020,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040105. 
3. Ibid.
4. Mary E. Davis, Erik Satie (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), ebook, accessed January 21, 2020, https://books.google.com/books?id=fYvxAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT31#v=onepage&q&f=false. 
5. Orledge, “Satie, Erik,” Grove Music Online. 
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8.  “Salammbô,” Encyclopædia Britannica (April 30, 2015), accessed January 21, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Salammbo. 
9.  Adrienne Mayor, “Sweating Truth in Ancient Carthage,” Stanford University (June 2010), accessed January 21, 2020, https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/MayorSweatingTruthCarth.pdf. 
10. Davis, Erik Satie, ebook. 
11. Ibid.
12. Quoted in Ibid.
13. Orledge, “Satie, Erik,” Grove Music Online.