Erik Satie: Gymnopédies

Here’s one with pictures. Compare this to your favorite slutty half-time show filled with demonic symbolism.

15:45 – Updated 23 Dec 2022 because the original YouTube video was no longer available.


Special Thanks to Estoy Perdida…

Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (17 May 1866 – 1 July 1925), who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. Satie was an influential artist in the late 19th and early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd.

Satie was introduced as a “gymnopedist” in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. He later also referred to himself as a “phonometrograph” or “phonometrician” (meaning “someone who measures (and writes down) sounds”), preferring this designation to that of “musician” after having been called “a clumsy but subtle technician” in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911.

The Gymnopédies, published in Paris starting in 1888, are three piano compositions written by Satie.

The Gnossiennes are several piano compositions by the French composer in the late 19th century. The works are for the most part in free time (lacking time signatures or bar divisions) and highly experimental with form, rhythm and chordal structure. The form as well as the term was invented by Satie.

The first Three Gnossiennes were composed around 1890 and first published in 1893. The Gnossiennes Nos. 4–6 were published only in 1968, long after Satie’s death.

  • Gymmopedie No. 1
  • Gnossienne No. 1
  • Gnossienne No. 3
  • Gnossienne No. 4
  • Gnossienne No. 2

Paintings (mostly) by Edouard Cortès. Edouard Léon Cortès (1882–1969) was a French painter of French and Spanish ancestry. He is known as “Le Poète Parisien de la Peinture” or “the Parisian Poet of Painting” because of his diverse Paris cityscapes in a variety of weather and night settings.


Originally posted to Fakebook on 18 March 2020.

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