Premier Menuet

[2] The finished work bears the outward trappings of its classical antecedents - 3/4 time and ABA structure, with the B section imitating a trio - though it avoids traditional development and is subjected to Satie's characteristic unexpected harmonic progressions.

Unlike his previous Neoclassical keyboard work the Sonatine bureaucratique (1917), there are no elements of pastiche or parody in the Menuet; instead it reflects the sober, abstract style of his 1919 Nocturnes.

1, Sonatine bureaucratique, Part I of Socrate, and works by Byrd, Monteverdi, Bach, Rameau, Couperin, Domenico Scarlatti, Pergolesi, Gluck, and Mozart.

The occasion was the first of three concerts that month in which Meyer presented Satie's music in historical contexts, from the early clavecin masters to the contemporary avant-garde.

The Premier Menuet has been mentioned along with Socrate and the Nocturnes as representing a short-lived phase (1918 to 1920) in Satie's later output that owed nothing at all to humor,[7][8] to which may be added the song Elégie (in memory of Debussy) from his Quatre petites melodies (1920).