Gnossienne No.5

Open at this stage in his career to any influence that wasn’t classical, conventional, academic or anything too much to do with the ordinary major and minor scales, Erik Satie was particularly impressed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 by a group of Rumanian folk musicians. The piece now known as Gnossienne No.5, although it was actually the first in the series, was his immediate reaction to that experience. In keeping with a title suggestive of some ancient ritual, like the Gymnopédie title attached to three earlier piano pieces, it is a slow-moving dance with a modally inflected, exotically decorated melodic line sustained in the right hand over a regular rhythmic accompaniment in the left. Though rather more eventful than the Gymnopédies, it has something of the same hypnotic quality.