The Easiest Satie Pieces, Measured

Satie is the best answer to a question beginners ask constantly: what can I play that is genuinely beautiful and genuinely within reach? For most great composers those two things pull apart. For Satie they do not, and the reason is that his music is slow, thin and built from repetition on purpose.

We measured all 27 Satie transcriptions in the library. They run from 16 out of 100 to 90. Here they are, easiest first.

The easiest Satie is not the famous one

Everyone arrives wanting Gymnopédie No. 1, and it is the hardest of the three: 42 out of 100, against 40 for No. 2 and 34 for No. 3. The differences are small, and any of them is a reasonable first Satie — but if you want the gentlest of the set, it is No. 3, not the famous one.

Five pieces on this list are easier than all three. The Enfantillages pittoresques at 16, Gnossienne No. 2 at 19, a movement of the Chapitres tournés en tous sens at 27, Gnossienne No. 3 at 28 and Gnossienne No. 1 at 33.

Start with the children's pieces

Enfantillages pittoresques is the easiest Satie in the library and it is there for a reason. It belongs to a set of three collections of beginner pieces Satie wrote in October 1913, built deliberately around the five fingers of each hand — and written, characteristically, not to shelter children from modern music but to prepare them for its sound.

It has another distinction: it is one of only 21 pieces in the entire library that never touch a black key. If you want the single gentlest entry into real concert-hall repertoire that exists on this site, it is this.

Then the Gnossiennes

The Gnossiennes are where Satie stops being easy-and-pleasant and starts being strange, which is the point of him.

He composed the first three around 1890 and published them in 1893, and their famous feature is on the page rather than in the ear: the piano scores have no time signatures and no bar lines at all — free time, with the pulse left entirely to the player.

For a beginner working from letter notes, that is a gift most repertoire cannot give you. There is no metre to count against and no bar you are falling behind in. You take each phrase at the speed your hands can actually manage, and the result is not a compromise — it is a legitimate performance decision the composer explicitly handed you.

The word itself is unresolved. It appears in an 1865 Larousse dictionary for the ritual labyrinth dance Theseus is said to have invented after killing the Minotaur, and it may equally derive from gnosis — Satie was involved with gnostic circles in exactly those years.

What makes Satie playable when other Romantics are not

Three things, and they are worth understanding because they tell you what to look for elsewhere.

Slow tempo. Three of the pieces here are among the 35 slowest in the entire library. Slow does not mean easy, but it means you have time to find the next key, which for a learner is most of the battle.

Almost no chords under the melody. The right hand carries one line. Compare that with Schumann, where the tune is often buried inside a four-note handful.

Repetition without variation. A Gymnopédie states its accompaniment pattern and then keeps it, unchanged, for minutes. Learn eight seconds of left hand and you have learned most of the piece.

The one thing that will actually be hard

The left-hand leap. In all three Gymnopédies and much of the rest, the left hand plays a low bass note and then jumps up to a chord, over and over, and it has to land quietly and in time.

Practise that alone. Use the hands-separate control, set the left hand going by itself, and drop the speed until the jump is comfortable — then raise it in small steps. This is the whole difficulty of early Satie, and half an hour spent on it is worth more than a week of playing the piece through hoping the jump improves on its own.

Where to go next

Satie for beginners goes further into a recommended order. For pieces that are gentle for the same structural reasons, see the slowest pieces in the library and pieces with no black keys. If you want to know what the level badges do and do not tell you, read the hardest pieces in the library.

Facts from Wikipedia: Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes and Enfantines. Difficulty scores are our own measurement of each transcription in this library.