Though much of Satie's music remains little known beyond the ranks of devoted connoisseurs, the three Gymnopedies (1888) for piano are instantly familiar. Indeed, Satie no doubt would have been amused by the range and absurdity of the contexts in which they have since been presented, from ballet scores to jazz-rock fusion arrangements to commercials for mundane consumer products. Debussy was very fond of these pieces -- his orchestrations of the first and third likely exceed the popularity of the original version -- and even Satie's critics grudgingly admired them. One of the composer's contemporaries famously remarked that these little pieces "seemed to have been written by a savage with taste."
The etymology of the title is important, and its significance is a source of some debate amongst scholars and critics. Though Satie insisted that the work was inspired by the writings of novelist Gustav Flaubert, "Gymnopedies" rather suggests Ancient Greece. Gymnopedia festivals, held in honor of warriors felled in battle, consisted of naked youths dancing and miming wrestling and boxing poses. As Satie scholar Eric Gillmor has noted, the composer had some knowledge of the Greek language and history by way of involuntary training in Greek as a boy. As with most of Satie's music, so steeped in satire and enigma, it is in the end difficult to make a connection between the Gymnopedies and their source of inspiration.
The Gymnopedies follow closely on the heels of the Sarabandes of 1887, which, Satie and his apologists insisted, marked a turning point in the history of French music. The Sarabandes, with their modal, plainchant-like melodies and static harmony comprised of unresolved chains of seventh chords, were a decidedly anti-Wagnerian statement in 1887, when the musical life of Paris was dominated by the German composer's works and admirers. As though a direct rebellion against the bombast of Wagnerian music drama, Satie composed the Sarabandes, described by the composer's friend Roland-Manuel as possessing "a sonorous magic of complete originality."
The same might be said of the Gymnopedies; they are certainly works of "sonorous magic" and share many of the musical traits of their predecessors. At the same time, they are somewhat more organic than the Sarabandes; the three pieces essentially explore a single idea, albeit each from a slightly altered perspective. This, according to Gillmor, betrays the influence of cubism on the work. Like the Sarabandes, only more so, the Gymnopedies "are one piece written three times -- cast in the same mold as it were, but with the most subtle variations in phrasing, harmonic coloring, and balancing of part." The simple modal melodies are repeated with slight variations, while successions of seventh and ninth chords provide a gentle, colorful underpinning whose "sonorous magic" mitigates its dissonance. Each of the three pieces has a tonal center, in each case unstable, merely hinted at and encircled by the undulating harmonic shifts. Satie eschews melodic development in favor of repetition and juxtaposition of melodic elements, which, together with the static harmonic language, lend the work its characteristic dreamy quality.
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