4eme gnossienne erik satie biography
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Reinbert de Leeuw
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🔹 Label: Philips Classics / Deutsche Grammophon
🔹 Very slow, very contemplative.
🔹 He takes a radical tack: making the silence last, as if he were remembering a dream.
🗝️ For some, it’s sublime.
Satie’s compositions are marked by their originality, wit, eccentricity, and striking simplicity, rejecting the emotional excesses of Romanticism.
But as so often with him, the word is also a game, a veil drawn over something elusive. There are three Gymnopédies and six Gnossiennes, all composed between 1887 and 1895. An evolution through the pieces
Gnossiennes 1 to 3 (1889-1890) are the freest and most experimental.
Gnossiennes 4 to 6 (1891-1897) show a return to a more measured structure, with barlines and a more legible organisation.
Gnossienne 7 (discovered after Satie’s death) is even more framed, almost classical in its construction, though it retains a harmonic strangeness.
🧘♂️ 7.
They are known for their enigmatic atmosphere, lack of classical structure and meditative character. Founder of a church, habitué of low dives. More rhythmic and regular, it perhaps reflects the influence of his time at the Schola Cantorum, where he studied counterpoint.
Gnossienne No. 7: Its attribution to Satie is controversial.
Alexandre Tharaud
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🔹 Label: Harmonia Mundi
🔹 Clarity, silky touch, transparent sonority.
🔹 He plays with great expressive restraint, very Satie.
🗝️ A contemporary, refined version, without showboating.
🎧 7. They were gradually published in the twentieth century, often cautiously, as musicologists were not always certain of their definitive status.
🧩 To sum up
1889-1890: Gnossiennes 1 to 3 – free, modal, without measures.
1891-1897: Gnossiennes 4 to 6 – more structured, but still atypical.
Posthumous: Gnossienne 7 – discovered after his death, attribution uncertain.
Episodes and anecdotes
Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes are shrouded in mystery, and a few episodes and anecdotes about their creation or their author add to their strange aura.
There they found dozens of unpublished scores, worn umbrellas hanging on the wall, two pianos stacked on top of each other (one unusable because the other had been placed on top), and carefully preserved objects, such as love letters that had never been sent. His scores are also filled with playful written instructions aimed at performers - though he was adamant that these remarks should not be spoken aloud in concert.
Technically, there is no better description than this, from Constant Lambert: “Melodically speaking we find the juxtaposition of short lyrical phrases of great tenderness with ostinatos of extreme and deliberate bareness …. There is copious testimony as to the utter shambles of his living space — yet the moment he steps outside this tiny cell he is a smiling dandy, spick and span, his own ambulant branch of Yohji Yamamoto.
The Satie life contains so much murk; his music sparkles with riverine clarity.
Like Magritte’s painting of a bowler-hatted gentleman standing between two creatures, one of sea and one of air: neither fish nor fowl.
Maybe what we rush to define as opposites should not always be seen that way.
Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic.
He even composed music ‘for initiation salons’. There is a certain melancholy about it.
Gnossienne No. 4 – More structured, but still free. Daniel Varsano
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Label: CBS Masterworks
Varsano has recorded the Gnossiennes with particular sensitivity, capturing the gentle irony and mystery of the pieces.
It was here that the Gnossiennes 4 to 7 resurfaced.
La Balancoire
Sports et Divertissements 3. They were composed in the late 1880s, just after he had left the Chat Noir cabaret, and while living in Montmartre, immersed in mysticism, symbolist poetry, and the influence of esoteric sects such as Joséphin Péladan.
Gnossienne No. 1: Composed in 1890, this is Satie’s best-known work.
His approach is natural, almost conversational, offering an intimate experience of Satie’s music.
🎹 9 Igor Levit
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Notable performance: Satie’s ‘Vexations
Although best known for performing ‘Vexations’, another Satie work, Levit demonstrates stamina and total immersion in the composer’s world, reflecting a deep understanding of his aesthetic.