Gnossiennes

The natural successor to his Trois Gymnopédies and written in a similarly dreamlike manner that suggests a set of otherworldly dances distantly perceived through closed doors, Satie’s Gnossiennes are pieces for solo piano that, like so much of the composer’s music, have a confrontational simplicity—designed to challenge the high-powered, virtuoso stance of so much 19th-century keyboard writing. They were initially published in 1893 as just three pieces, with another three added posthumously in 1968; their collective title is a word invented by Satie with no fixed translation—although it evidently has to do with Gnosticism: the secret wisdom of occult groups with which Satie had periodic connections. The music has no time signatures, though there’s an implied 4/4 meter and a sense of slow-moving ritual progression, with spare melodies unfolding against equally spare chordal accompaniments, delicately embellished on terms that conjure up what Satie’s contemporaries would have heard as the harmonic "exoticism" of the Far East. Today, it feels more like "ambient" music—but with a potentially disturbing quality that claims attention rather than evaporating into nothingness.