Gymnopédie No. 1 vs Clair de Lune: The Two Calm Pieces, Compared
If what you want is the slow, floating, slightly sad piano music people put on to think to, you will end up at one of these two. They are the most requested "beautiful but surely playable" pieces there are.
Our difficulty scores put them four points apart — Gymnopédie No. 1 at 42, Clair de Lune at 47. Those four points are the most misleading numbers on this site, and this page exists to explain why.
The measurements
| Gymnopédie No. 1 | Clair de Lune | |
|---|---|---|
| Difficulty score | 42 / 100 | 47 / 100 |
| Notes in the transcription | 282 | 1,468 |
| Notes per second | 1.5 | 4.5 |
| Pitch span | 49 keys | 71 keys |
| Smallest keyboard it fits | 49 keys | 76 keys |
| Black keys, as a share of notes | 19% | 74% |
Clair de Lune has five times the notes, moves three times as fast, needs a keyboard half again as wide, and three notes in four are black keys.
Why the scores do not show that
Our difficulty score measures the mechanics of playing: how fast notes arrive, how far the hands travel, how often they land together, how much of the writing is black-key. It does that well within a style. It does it badly across a five-fold difference in length, because it does not measure endurance or memory at all.
Gymnopédie No. 1 is 282 notes. You can hold the whole thing in your head. Clair de Lune is a nine-minute piece of Impressionist writing in D♭ major — five flats — with a middle section in a different metre and a texture that changes every few bars. The score says 47. Reality says: this is the piece you learn in your second or third year.
We would rather tell you that than have you find out.
What each one actually teaches
Gymnopédie No. 1 teaches slowness. Its whole difficulty is holding a tempo of about one and a half notes per second without speeding up, and letting the left hand's bass-then-chord pattern stay perfectly even underneath. That is a genuinely useful and genuinely hard skill, and it is the only thing the piece asks of you.
Clair de Lune teaches the D♭ major hand position, which is unlike anything a beginner has done, and voicing — bringing out one line inside a chord while the others stay quiet. Both are worth learning. Neither is a first-year job.
Start here instead, if you want the sound now
Satie wrote three Gymnopédies and they are not equally hard. Number 1 is in fact the hardest of the three by our measurement — see the easiest Satie pieces, where five other pieces of his beat all three. His Enfantillages Pittoresques scores 16.
For the Debussy sound without the Debussy difficulty, the honest answer is that there is no shortcut; the sound comes from the harmony, and the harmony is the hard part. Play the Gymnopédies until they are effortless, then come back.
Both, in letter notes
- Gymnopédie No. 1 — 282 notes, fits 49 keys
- Clair de Lune — 1,468 notes, needs 76 keys, 74% black keys
Read next: how to play Gymnopédie No. 1, a beginner's guide to Clair de Lune, and Satie for beginners.