Many listings of the works of French fin de siècle composer Erik Satie omit the charming piano piece Petite ouverture à danser, as it was only officially added to his oeuvre after his death. In fact, the work existed only as a draft in a sketchbook—one of numerous pieces that Satie composed but never published—until discovered by Satie scholar Robert Caby and published in 1968. In fact, Caby not only contributed such editorial necessities as bar lines and expressive markings, but also supplied the work's fanciful title. Thought to have been composed shortly before 1900, the piece exhibits many of the compositional traits of the much better known Gnossiennes (3) (1890), of which it is perhaps an extension. (Along with the Petite ouverture, Caby's 1968 publications also included three previously unpublished Gnossienes from 1891.) The piece features a streamlined texture supporting a simple, plaintive melody, unburdened by dissonance or drama. Beginning and ending in A flat major, the overture wanders freely through various seemingly unrelated keys, using melodic turns and tweaked cadential motions to chromatically veer from one brief harmonic plane to another—never with the goal-directed angst of post-Romantic longing, but with the casual air of a wandering observer. The distinctive rising and falling gesture and dotted rhythm of the main theme serve as a point of reference, contrasting the plain, scalar lines that dominate the piece's middle section. Throughout the piece, the composer creates a fluid surface by expanding and contracting phrase lengths (a feature that falls into artificial tension with Caby's bar line placement and 2/4 meter), while at the same time maintaining rhythmic continuity and subtle momentum by underscoring the entire piece with offbeat chords in the inner voices. The piece returns near its conclusion to the lucid A flat melody of the beginning, leaving intact the opening section's curious modulation to F major to bring the work to a serene but harmonically ambiguous close.

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