Satie named his gentle Gymnopédies after an ancient Spartan dance of naked youths
Erik Satie's Gymnopédies take their name from gymnopaedia, a yearly ancient Greek festival at which young men danced naked, or perhaps just unarmed. The three short piano pieces, finished by 2 April 1888, are now heard in films, pop records and video games, and are seen as forerunners of ambient music.
Nobody is sure where Satie found the word. He and his friend Alexis Roland-Manuel credited Flaubert's novel Salammbô. Others point to a poem by J. P. Contamine de Latour, since the first Gymnopédie appeared in a magazine in summer 1888 beside an extract from that poem using the term, though which came first is unknown. A music dictionary from 1839 could also have supplied it, defining the dance as one performed by young Spartan women.
Each piece runs about three minutes, in triple time, and the three share a theme and structure. Mild clashes between melody and harmony give them their bittersweet colour, and Satie marks them to be played painfully, sadly or gravely. The first opens by rocking between two major seventh chords, on G and then on D.
Publication came piecemeal: the first and third in 1888, the second not until 1895. By late 1896 Satie was short of money and falling out of fashion, and his friend Claude Debussy, then rising, helped by orchestrating two of them in February 1897. When Debussy's scores came out two years later he had swapped the numbers, so Satie's first became his third.
Later musicians kept returning to the set. Blood, Sweat and Tears won a Grammy for an arrangement on their 1968 album, Gary Numan put one on a 1980 B-side, and Janet Jackson's 2001 single Someone to Call My Lover sampled the first piece on its way to number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Wes Anderson used it in The Royal Tenenbaums, and the video game Mother 3 reworked it for its soundtrack.
Source: Gymnopédies
