Hi everyone

I have just received Satie - Three Gnossiennes - for the Piano - its Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics.

I was really excited and itching to have a try and opened it up to find that there are no time signatures or bar lines, the notes are just continuous. Phrase marks are shown.

Could this be a misprint? I have never come across anything like this before.

ET

There is a Grade 6 piece from the new syllabus called 'Gnossienne No.3' by Satie. I have the exam book and it's printed in the same way, so I believe it's not a misprint.Car Expert

Thanks Car Expert.

Yes, this booklet has Gnossienne 1, 2 and 3.

So how do I know how to play it without a time signature, am I supposed to work it out by the phrase lines?

ET

No it's not a misprint, ET. If I remember correctly, Satie started using no bar line nor time signature in his set of Ogives which were composed a few years before the Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes, and this feature later became quite a norm of his.

I'd play in phrases. I think if you keep too strict time (i.e. metronome like) when playing the Gnossiennes, they can sound quite tedious.

Thank you, I will take it with me this evening to my piano lesson and see if my teacher can help me.

ET

Funny, I performed all three of these gnossiennes at my student concert on Saturday! Definitely not a misprint and they are surprisingly straightforward to play - just keep a steady crotchet beat going and count them out as if they have barlines!

That's right, I think this is what he intended. I think it's called 'minimalism'

I don't think Satie's quirks of notation can really be called "minimalism" in the normal musical sense. In this case the lack of bar lines are, in my opinion, more likely to be an effort to escape the concept of metre, rather than to be intentionally "minimal". Satie's music often disregards (then) traditional features of music, but this was so he could experiment outside of the confines of say, metre, or development. I would say that minimalist music is music that seeks to make a point of one, or at least less than usual, aspects of music. This could be "process music" like Reich's Piano Phase, or an exploration of the perception of pitch, like Stockhausen's Stimmung, or La Monte Young's Composition 1960 #7.
Lots of music of Satie's era and later disregards accepted notations but usually to explore new ground, rather than to limit musical material. For example, Schoenberg stopped using key signatures, not to become more "minimal" but because his music had moved beyond the confines of a key.



Surely that defeats the point of them not having barlines? Satie obviously had a reason for not using a metre - if you impose one then you lose some of what the composer intended. Listening to the piece (I haven't got a copy) it sounds like, while often quite regular, there is no metric pulse lasting more than a phrase or two before it is displaced by an extra quaver. Perhaps Satie wants the player to consider each phrase as an entity, not sharing the same metre as the ones surrounding it. That is not to say that the tempo should change, just that each part of the music should be discreet, making the piece more like a collage of similar phrases, rather than a development of an idea - a very Satie concept. Satie worked from the point of musical material speaking for itself, or making another point, and not requiring the obsessive development that characterises romantic music.

From my knowledge of studying A level Music (our class of 4 boys, in which we focus on Neoclassicism for the Western component), I understand that the no bar-lines thing was more of a gimmick than for a musical purpose; after all, look at his Parade and the controversial music he's written (e.g. Vexations ).

Satie wanted simple, non-expressive music that made the Gnossiennes triadic, tonal but with an ostinato / static harmony effect (e.g. A-flat, C & F chord in Gnossienne no.1). He wanted to make the Gnossiennes Neoclassical in style, keeping the homophonic and clear harmony bit of classical music apparent in the Gnossiennes, but he also wanted non-diatonic repetition, ensuring there are no chords; or if there are, they would be parallel or modal, making his music mildly dissonant. Probably an anti-Romantic gesture.

Anyway, you could try them out and find a tempo / rhythm that you think is apt.

Crikey! Did you read this straight off your 'A' level exam paper?

It's the little comments a I like!

"Quite Lost" about half way through Gnoss. 3 is my favorite!

I played gnoss 1-3 at N london music festival a few years back. Quite an experience!

I would ay that the Gnossiennes are very "Static" and that they should be played with a steady pulse to create a sort of hypnotic effect.

Thanks everyone for your replies, they are really helpful. Can't wait to have a proper go of them at the weekend.

ET

Me too...

On my version of the Gnoss 1 it says (among other things!) "From the tip of the thought" and "On the tip of the tongue". In the Gnoss 3 it says "Be clairvoyant" and "Counsel yourself cautiously".



I hope you enjoy playing them, ET

I'm glad you think so. My A level music paper is in about a month, and I've 3 other A level subjects excluding General Paper. We had to choose between 'Songs' and 'Neoclassicism' for the Western component, and it was unanimously neoclassicism.

Older composers wrote music that fitted the bar structure because the bar structure was all there was. However, the music didn't always fit this too conveniently. Look at some of Chopin, Beethoven, even Bach - the bars are there, strictly in place, but sometimes the music isn't quite in the same place. Sometimes they would change the time signature for short segments but sometimes they just tied over the bar line and carried on. Modern composers have found a variety of ways round this. One piece I'm working on (Szymanowski Etude Bb) has the odd bar of 1/4 thrown into the 3/4 and 4/4 (why not 5/4?). One piece by John Ireland that I can think of has 3/4 and 4/4 both marked next to one another at the start, and he switches between the two often without further marking. Satie's solution was simply to not write a time signature and bar lines in the first place. I don't believe it's any more complex than that.

If you want a really delightful modern example of time signatures being all over the place, listen to "The Closest Thing to Crazy" by Mike Batt (a hit sung by Katie Melua).

I'm findingthistopicinterestingbecauseIwaslookingatthatpieceinthenewGrade6listmybi
ggestproblemwithunusualwaysofwritingoutmu
sicisthatIsecretlythinkit'sabitpretentiousandthuscan'tquitebebotheredtoputtheeffortintodecodingitguessthemyproblemisjustthat
personally I prefer structure...

In the grade 6 exam pieces book they've gone to the trouble of adding a footnote that comments such as 'Open your head' are not to be taken literally. What did they expect? People pitching up to the exam with ketamine and a circular saw?

The Gnossiennes are nice little pieces; fine examples of the style recurring throughout Satie's Å“uvre where the notes hang in the air exactly the way bricks don't. For the few notes on the page, there's suprisingly much into which to get ones teeth.

Hear, hear! I get the same feeling with e e cummings and Damien Hurst. These gimmicks really get my goat, but there's no denying that they raise sales!

Mompou often dispenses with barlines

There is a piece in "absolute time" (i.e. no time signature or bar lines) in the grade 5 book for next year.