Gnossienne No. 3 · piano sheet music & MIDI file
Gnossienne No. 3 as a free MIDI file: five minutes of inner orient in the preview, the piano MIDI and sheet music PDF right below.
Preview played right in your browser with the app's real piano (lightweight version). Inside Pianovera: full multi-layer sound, fingering display and Wait mode.
Satie advises playing it "from the tip of the thought" and putting "much sorrow" into it. The third Gnossienne is the most oriental of the three: its scale with augmented seconds hints at an elsewhere that French music of 1890 wasn't supposed to name, and its MIDI unrolls a good five hypnotic minutes.
It's the longest of the set and the most demanding in concentration: nothing is hard, everything must stay even. The grace-note ornaments grow more present, the melody explores the low register, and the urge to speed up lurks on every page. Resist it: the slowness is the point.
What you'll be working on
- The oriental scale and its unusual intervals under the fingers
- Five minutes of evenness: the real challenge is mental
- Ornaments that color the line without interrupting it
- The melody sung low, without heaviness
Playing Gnossienne No. 3 on piano with Pianovera
Use Pianovera's progress bar to work in thirds: the piece is long and memorizes in blocks. The ornaments show up as tight little clusters in the preview, so you see them coming from far away.
Open Gnossienne No. 3 in Pianovera: notes fall toward the keyboard, each hand gets its color, and Wait mode is there if you're starting out.
Try Pianovera for freeDownload the Gnossienne No. 3 MIDI and sheet music
Two files are waiting for you: the Gnossienne No. 3 piano MIDI file (5 KB, opens in Pianovera or any MIDI player) and the Gnossienne No. 3 piano sheet music PDF (193 KB, printable). Both come from the same engraving: what you read on the score is exactly what you hear in the preview.
The work itself is in the public domain. This MIDI engraving comes from the Mutopia Project, typeset by Frédéric Duperray, under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license (free reuse with attribution, commercial included).
About this piece
Is Gnossienne No. 3 hard to play on piano?
We rate it intermediate: 600 notes over 5:24, spanning F#1 to A5. The first thing to work on: the oriental scale and its unusual intervals under the fingers.
Where can I get the sheet music for Gnossienne No. 3?
Right on this page: the "View the sheet music" button opens the PDF (193 KB), engraved by the Mutopia Project from the same source as the MIDI file, CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. View it, print it, keep it.
Is the Gnossienne No. 3 MIDI file really free?
Yes. Erik Satie died more than 70 years ago, so the work (1890) is public domain. This MIDI engraving is under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license: free to use, commercially included, with credit to Frédéric Duperray.