Gymnopédie No. 1

Erik Satie finished all three Gymnopédies by 2 April 1888, and the first was published that summer in the magazine La Musique des familles. It is marked Lent et douloureux, slow and sorrowful. Where the title came from is argued over. The word is the French form of the gymnopaedia, an ancient Greek festival where young men danced unclothed, or perhaps simply unarmed. Satie may have taken it from Flaubert's novel Salammbô, from a poem by J. P. Contamine de Latour that was printed beside the music, or from a music dictionary of 1839 that defines it.

By the end of 1896 Satie's popularity was waning and his money running short. In February 1897 his friend Claude Debussy orchestrated the first and third Gymnopédies, and when the scores were published two years later he swapped their numbers. Since then the first has become one of the best known things Satie wrote, heard in films from My Dinner with Andre to The Royal Tenenbaums, sampled by Janet Jackson, and often described as a forerunner of ambient music.

The whole piece rests on two chords rocking back and forth, a G major seventh and a D major seventh, one to a bar, and the melody floats above them in long notes. It enters on the second beat, steps down from a high A through F sharp and C sharp, and then sits on a low F sharp for four bars while the chords keep rocking underneath. The second time through it turns up to a long high F sharp and down to an E held for three bars, and the middle phrase leans on C and F naturals before it settles on D.

On a mandolin this page is a tremolo study before it is anything else. Nearly every bar is one long note or three slow quarters, and the long ones last two, three and four bars: the low F sharp at the fourth fret of the D course, the E at its second fret, and the d at the fifth fret of the A course. Keep the tremolo even and quiet through those, and let it run straight across the bar lines instead of stopping and restarting. Everything sits in first position, so the left hand has time to spare.