Easy piano song, sheet music with note names
Gymnopedie No 1 piano sheet music: the opening melody with letters
Gymnopedie No 1 piano sheet music: the opening melody of Satie’s piece with letter names and octaves, D major, 3/4. Play it, print it (A4, Letter PDF).
Two kinds of page: the tune with a letter name under every note, and a worksheet with the names left blank.
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Quick answer
Gymnopédie No. 1 on this page is the opening melody (pick-up and bars 1 to 7, right hand): 10 notes in 7 bars of 3/4, in D major, with a range of F♯4 to A5 (15 semitones). It begins on F♯5 and ends on F♯4. Below: the letter names with octave numbers and the left hand, the notes on the staff, a version you can play, a note-name worksheet and the checks that were run. It is a simplified melody: what is left out is listed under “What is on this page”.
Gymnopédie No. 1 at a glance
- Key
- D major (two sharps)
- Time signature
- 3/4: three beats to the bar, each a quarter note
- Range
- F♯4 to A5, 15 semitones
- Notes and bars
- 10 notes, 7 bars after a pick-up
- First note
- F♯5 (scale degree 3)
- Last note
- F♯4 (scale degree 3)
- Piece
- Gymnopédie No. 1 (“Lent et douloureux”), the first of the three Gymnopédies for piano
- Composer
- Erik Satie
- Date
- the set was completed by 2 April 1888; the first and third were published that year, the second in 1895 (Wikipedia)
- Title
- “Three Nude Dances”; Wikipedia says the source of the title has been a subject of debate
- Part on this page
- the pick-up and 7 bars of the first melody phrase, right hand (an excerpt, see below)
- Tempo on this page
- quarter note = 60; a slow practice speed chosen for this page; the edition marks only “Lent et douloureux”
- Hands
- Right hand: the melody shown on the staff. Left hand: the bass notes of each bar, from the same edition, are in the table below.
- Level
- Medium: wider than a major sixth (15 semitones); wider than an octave. How the level is worked out
What is on this page
This is an excerpt. The staff shows the right hand’s melody of the first eight-bar phrase: the two-note pick-up that starts on the second beat of the first melody bar, then 7 bars, one long F♯ held for four of them. The four bars of accompaniment alone that open the piece and the chords that sit under the melody are not shown. The left-hand column gives the bass note of each bar. The rest of the piece is not included.
Press a note on the staff to hear it. The sound is made in your browser from the notes of this page (a plain synthesiser, not a recording). Normal speed is quarter note = 60: a slow practice speed chosen for this page; the edition marks only “Lent et douloureux”.
Gymnopédie No. 1
D major · 3/4 · melody with note names · the opening melody
Key D major (two sharps: F♯, C♯) Range F♯4 to A5 Music Erik Satie (Gymnopédie No. 1, published 1888)
Scale of D major D E F♯ G A B C♯ Middle C is C4, the C nearest the middle of the keyboard
Melody: Mutopia Project, "Gymnopédie No. 1", right hand (Evin Robertson) (Public Domain; Mutopia-2014/12/14-37), checked note by note against 2 other sources. Simplified: the opening melody (pick-up and bars 1 to 7, right hand). Free to print and share. musictheoryprint.com/charts/gymnopedie-no-1-piano-notes
Gymnopédie No. 1: name the notes
D major · 3/4 · worksheet
Name Date Class
Write the letter name of every note on the line under it. The key signature tells you which notes are sharp: F♯, C♯. The home note of the key is D.
Check your answers against the sheet with the note names. Extra: circle every note that is a D, the home note of the key.
Melody: Mutopia Project, "Gymnopédie No. 1", right hand (Evin Robertson) (Public Domain). Simplified: the opening melody (pick-up and bars 1 to 7, right hand). Free to print and share. musictheoryprint.com/charts/gymnopedie-no-1-piano-notes
The notes of Gymnopédie No. 1, bar by bar
10 notes in 7 bars, after a pick-up, in D major. Each note is a letter and an octave number: C4 is middle C, the C nearest the middle of the keyboard, and the numbers go up by one at every C. The ♯ and ♭ mean the black key above or below the letter. “held” means a tied note that is not played again; “rest” is silence. The left-hand column gives the bass notes of each bar, read from the same edition; “held” there means a bass note that is still sounding from the bar before.
| Bar | Right hand (melody) | Left hand (bass) | do re mi |
|---|---|---|---|
| pick-up | F♯5 A5 | G2 | mi sol |
| 1 | G5 F♯5 C♯5 | D2 | fa mi ti |
| 2 | B4 C♯5 D5 | G2 | la ti do |
| 3 | A4 | D2 | sol |
| 4 | F♯4 | G2 | mi |
| 5 | F♯4 | D2 | mi |
| 6 | F♯4 | G2 | mi |
| 7 | F♯4 | D2 | mi |
do re mi uses movable do: do is D.
Which keys to press
The tune spans 10 letter names, from F♯4 to A5, more than an octave, so the hand has to travel along the keyboard. Try the notes on the virtual piano or press a note on the staff above to hear it.
What the tune is made of
How the melody moves
Each of the 9 moves from one note to the next, counted.
Which note lengths it uses
Every note counted by its length, as a fraction of a whole note.
Most-used note: F♯5 (2 times). Longest run of one repeated note: 1. Different pitches: 8, made from 6 note names (some are used in two octaves). Biggest leap: 5 semitones.
How the notes were checked
Not one note on this page was typed in or remembered. The melody is read by a program from Mutopia Project, "Gymnopédie No. 1", right hand (Evin Robertson) (Public Domain; Mutopia-2014/12/14-37), cut to the opening melody (pick-up and bars 1 to 7, right hand). A second program then looked for the same notes, in the same order, in each of the sources below, which were typeset or encoded by other people. The number is the share of this page’s notes that are found there, whatever key the other source is in; where a source covers only the start of the tune, only that part is compared (it is named in the table).
| Source | Licence | Notes there | Same pitches | Same pitches and lengths |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia, "Gymnopédies" (score 1 in the article)revision 1362135796 of 2026-07-02; compared on the pick-up and bars 1 to 3 of this page | CC BY-SA 4.0 | 9 | 100% | 100% |
| Wikimedia Commons, "Satie Gymnopedie 1 first eight bars.mid"uploaded 2018-08-01, SHA-1 a93b200f23; compared on the pick-up and bars 1 to 3 of this page | Public domain | 19 | 100% | 89% |
The second column is lower than the first because editions write the same long notes in different ways (a half note and a tied pair, a held last note) and because performance MIDI files shorten or lengthen notes. Pitch is the part that matters for the letter names. A MIDI file of a whole piano piece does not say which notes are the melody, so the program takes the highest note at each moment; a melody note that sits under a higher accompaniment note can be missed, and that is the usual reason for a “no matching note” above.
Gymnopédie No. 1: questions people ask
What are the letter notes of Gymnopédie No. 1?
The first notes, with their octave numbers, are F♯5 A5 G5 F♯5 C♯5 B4 C♯5 D5 A4 F♯4 F♯4 F♯4. Every note of the opening melody is in the table above, one bar per row (middle C is C4, the C nearest the middle of the keyboard; the next C up is C5).
What key and time signature is Gymnopédie No. 1 in?
On this page it is in D major (two sharps), in 3/4: three beats to the bar, each a quarter note. The key signature has two sharps (F♯ and C♯). Wikipedia says the first bars alternate two major seventh chords, on G and on the tonic D, so the piece is in D major; the Mutopia file labels the same key signature B minor.
Which hand plays what, and how high and low does it go?
The range is F♯4 to A5, 15 semitones. The tune spans 10 letter names, from F♯4 to A5, more than an octave, so the hand has to travel along the keyboard.
Is this the whole of Gymnopédie No. 1?
No. It is the first phrase of the melody. Wikipedia describes the Gymnopédies as short pieces, and the Mutopia edition goes on after this page with a second phrase that starts an octave higher.
Is Gymnopédie No. 1 free to print and share?
Satie completed the Gymnopédies by 2 April 1888 and the first one was published that year, according to Wikipedia, so the music is far out of copyright. The edition used here is the Mutopia Project typesetting made from a Dover edition, marked Public Domain by its typesetter. The sheets are made by this site and may be printed and shared. Modern arrangements and recordings have their own rights.
How do I know the notes are right?
The melody is read by a program from Mutopia Project, "Gymnopédie No. 1", right hand (Evin Robertson), never typed in. A second program then compares it, note by note and in order, with 2 other sources: Wikipedia's score (100% of its notes, the pick-up and bars 1 to 3); MIDI file “Satie Gymnopedie 1 first eight bars” (100% of its notes, the pick-up and bars 1 to 3). 2 of the 2 agree with this page on every pitch. Where they differ, the page lists every note and bar, so you can see the difference.
What does “Lent et douloureux” mean?
It is French for slow and painful, the marking at the top of the piece. Wikipedia says the performance instructions of the three Gymnopédies are to play “painfully” (douloureux), “sadly” (triste) or “gravely” (grave).
Why is one note held for four bars?
The melody rests on F♯4, tied across bars 4 to 7 of this page: 12 beats of 3/4 on one note. The left hand keeps moving under it, with one bass note in each bar, G2 and D2 in turn (see the left-hand column).
What does Gymnopédie mean?
Wikipedia says the title comes from the French form of gymnopaedia, the ancient Greek word for an annual festival where young men danced either naked or, perhaps figuratively, simply unarmed. The set is known as the “Three Nude Dances”.
musictheoryprint.com · free to print and share
Gymnopédie No. 1 in real music: the numbers
In D major the tune uses 6 of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, all of them inside the key. It moves by step 5 times out of 9, and ends on degree 3.
This tune against real art songs
| What | This tune | OpenScore Lieder (880 major-key songs) |
|---|---|---|
| First note | F♯5 (degree 3) | 32.5% start on degree 3 |
| Last note | F♯4 (degree 3) | 8.6% end on degree 3 |
| Range of the tune | 15 semitones (F♯4 to A5) | 27% of 1,458 first vocal lines span fewer semitones, 61% more |
The art-song numbers are for the first vocal line of every major-key song whose key signature does not change; the numbers for this tune are counted on the melody printed above.
How common D major is
| Collection | Items with a key | Share in D major | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenScore Lieder | 1,462 | 6.8% | 4 of 24 |
| Mutopia | 1,974 | 9.9% | 3 of 24 |
| MusicBrainz works | 13,669 | 11.4% | 1 of 24 |
| MusicBrainz works | 5,340 | 11.0% | 1 of 24 |
| Open Opus work titles | 3,587 | 11.0% | 2 of 24 |
| AcousticBrainz recordings | 63,124 | 6.0% | 7 of 24 |
Counts of key signatures (and estimated major or minor) in the collections the site has measured; see the key page for D major.
Where the tune sits among singers' ranges
| Voice type (as labelled in the scores) | Typical range of a real song line | This tune (F♯4 to A5) |
|---|---|---|
| Soprano | E♭4 to F5 | wider than this range by 1 semitone |
| Alto / Contralto | C4 to C5 | wider than this range by 3 semitones |
| Tenor | F3 to F♯4 | wider than this range by 2 semitones |
| Baritone | C3 to E4 | fits if moved down 17 semitones |
| Bass | A2 to C4 | fits if moved down 21 semitones |
Typical range = the median across song lines of the lowest and highest notes (ignoring one stray note each side), from 285 vocal lines in the OpenScore Lieder Corpus. "Fits" means both ends of the tune are inside it.
Method
- This tune's own numbers are counted by a script on the decoded melody (tied notes counted once, rests ignored).
- Art-song numbers are read from the files behind the site's statistics pages (OpenScore Lieder Corpus: key and scale-degree counts for the first vocal line of every piece, vocal ranges of 1,458 lines).
- Key counts for Mutopia and MusicBrainz come from the same published statistics; a key is counted from its key signature.
Data: computed from the OpenScore Lieder Corpus (CC0), 1,462 scores. Snapshot: commit 6b2dc542ce (2026-04-07).
Background
Excerpts from open reference works, reproduced as published (references, images and tables removed). Every excerpt names its source, licence and original article.
About “Gymnopédie No. 1”
Overview
The Gymnopédies, or Trois Gymnopédies ('Three Nude Dances"), are three piano compositions written by French composer and pianist Erik Satie. He completed the whole set by 2 April 1888, but they were at first published individually: the first and the third compositions were published in 1888, while the second would not be published until 1895.
History
The work's unusual title comes from the French form of gymnopaedia, the ancient Greek word for an annual festival where young men danced either naked or, perhaps figuratively, simply unarmed. The source of the title has been a subject of debate. Satie and his friend Alexis Roland-Manuel maintained that he adopted it after having read Gustave Flaubert's novel Salammbô, while others see a poem by J. P. Contamine de Latour as the source of Satie's inspiration, since the first Gymnopédie was published in the magazine La Musique des familles in the summer of 1888 together with an excerpt of Latour's poem Les Antiques, where the term appears.
Music
These short, atmospheric pieces are written in 3/4 time, with each sharing a common theme and structure.
The melodies of the pieces use deliberate, but mild, dissonances against the harmony, producing a piquant, melancholy effect that matches the performance instructions, which are to play each piece "painfully" (douloureux), "sadly" (triste), or "gravely" (grave). The first few bars of Gymnopédie No. 1 (shown below) consist of an alternating progression of two major seventh chords, the first on the subdominant, G, and the second on the tonic, D.
Source: Wikipedia, “Gymnopédies” — CC BY-SA 4.0 — text excerpted; see the article for the full text and authors. Revision of 2026-07-02.
Sources and licences for the text, scores and recordings on this page are on the credits page.
Sources: Mutopia Project, "Gymnopédie No. 1", right hand (Evin Robertson), Wikipedia, "Gymnopédies" (score 1 in the article), Wikimedia Commons, "Satie Gymnopedie 1 first eight bars.mid".