Bords de l'Ilissus, by Satie
Every score here is public domain, free to read, print and keep. Open it in the browser and it plays, at whatever tempo you can read it.
Get the practice plan for Bords de l'Ilissus
Here it is. Check your inbox for day 1.
- Hear it through at Slow (45 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 2 big beats to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in C major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: Em7, Em6, D6 and C♯m7♭5. Play each one as a block in your left hand and say its name, so you know what the harmony is before the left hand has to move.
- Learn the left hand of the same bars on its own. Keep it quiet and even: it is the floor the tune stands on.
- Put hands together at Slow, 45 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (68 bpm) once Slow feels easy three times in a row. Then learn the next 8 bars the same way: right hand, left hand, together.
- Play the whole piece (about 7 minutes) from the start, at whatever speed keeps it going. A steady run with a few slips beats a fast one that stops.
About this piece
Bords de l'Ilissus is a song by Erik Satie (1866 to 1925), from Socrate, to words by Plato. It was written for voice and piano; here the singer's tune is folded into the top of the right hand, over the piano's own part, so one player gives the whole song. The first verse of the French words sits under the tune.
How to play it
Let the tune sing out on top of the right hand and keep the notes under it lighter, as a singer would be heard over the piano. Where the voice rests, the introductions and interludes are exactly as the composer wrote them.
Reading it, and printing it
The score opens in Artform's reader, which shows the music as engraved notation and plays it back so you can hear the line before you try it. You can slow the tempo down, loop a passage that is not working yet, and print the page when you would rather have paper on the stand.
The file itself is MusicXML, which MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and Dorico all open, so the notes are yours to keep whatever you read them in.
More free Satie sheet music
Who Satie was
French composer who treated the seriousness of the Parisian concert world as something to be quietly mocked, giving his pieces titles like "Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear" and instructing performers to play one passage "like a nightingale with a toothache." The Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, spare and strange for their time, sound almost accidentally ahead of their era, anticipating minimalism and ambient music by the better part of a century. He worked for years as a cabaret pianist to pay the rent, and lived in near poverty in a single room that, after his death, was found to contain dozens of identical velvet suits and umbrellas he had never worn or used.
Learn the music behind it
Reading a piece and understanding it are different skills. If you want the harmony under this one, the chord trainer teaches chords the way songs use them, and the scale pages cover the fingering for every key, including C major.