Erik Satie | Gnossienne No. 3 (Change Request ReVision)
Official Video: https://bit.ly/3clpSSj
For this ReVision, I reimagined one of the more poignant pieces in his Trois Gnossiennes piano works from 1890, “Gnossienne No. 3”, the final “Lent” free-time piece, following the “Gnossienne No. 2 - Avec Étonnement”.
An abstract French Impressionist and influential artist of the early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde, Éric Alfred Leslie Satie aka Erik Satie (1866–1925), broke ground with his work for future artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and ambient music with his innovative “Musique D’Ameublement” works, dating from 1917.
An accomplished art and cultural journalist, publishing works for outlets as wide-ranging as the Dadaist 391 to Vanity Fair, he wrote under his own name as well as Virginie Lebeau and François de Paule during his most active years.
The first Trois Gnossiennes are piano compositions that are highly experimental with form, rhythm, and chordal structure. The Gnossienne form and its name was the original invention of Satie, a rare occasion in Western Music—however, common with the French Impressionism movement, seeing Claude Debussy, among others, reinventing the Esquisses Symphoniques, with his triptych approach—where a composer employed a new term to describe the form of their work.
These Gnossiennes were first published in Le Figaro musical No. 24 of September 1893, with the piano solo versions of the first three Gnossiennes are without time signatures or bar lines, with the “Gnossienne No. 3” returning to the thematic material of “Gnossienne No. 1”
Inspired by another master of French music, Francis Poulenc, whose orchestration of this work in 1939 completely transformed it. Conceiving a fresh contemporary sonic cosmos for this standard piece of repertoire, Poulenc transfigured this work dynamically and motivated me to take it into even another realm.
This arrangement features a return to Da Capo twice, with a Mozart-styled-minuet to conclude. I orchestrated this through synthesis and not traditional orchestral sections but organized the sound design around their respective sonic statements. Using a variety of Oberheim pads, Sequential Circuits brass, and Roland Juno strings and bass, this was embellished with modern percussive accompaniments.
Written By Erik Satie in Paris, France (1893)
Orchestrated By Neal Andrew Emil Gustafson (2019)
Produced By Change Request in Chicago, IL (2020)
Video By Andrew Emil (www.andrewemil.com)
