Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (1866 – 1925), who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. He was the son of a French father and a British mother. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but was an undistinguished student and obtained no diploma. In the 1880s he worked as a pianist in café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing works, mostly for solo piano, such as his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached.

The Sarabandes are three dances for solo piano composed in 1887 by Erik Satie. Along with the famous Gymnopédies (1888) they are regarded as his first important works, and the ones upon which his reputation as a harmonic innovator and precursor of modern French music, beginning with Debussy, principally rests. The Sarabandes also played a key role in Satie's belated "discovery" by his country's musical establishment in the 1910s, setting the stage for his international notoriety. French composer and critic Alexis Roland-Manuel wrote in 1916 that the Sarabandes represented "a milestone in the evolution of our music...pieces of an unprecedented harmonic technique, born of an entirely new aesthetic, which create a unique atmosphere, a sonorous magic of complete originality."

The sarabande is a dance in triple meter that originated in the Spanish colonies of Central America in the mid-1500s. It had migrated to Europe by the 17th century, where in France it became a popular slow court dance. Satie's modern reinterpretations consist of three dances with a total duration of roughly 15 minutes: Sarabande No. 1 in Ab Major, Sarabande No. 2 in D# minor & Sarabande No. 3 in Bb minor.

The Sarabandes emerged at a point in Satie's life when he was beginning to assert his independence as a man and artist. In November 1886, the 20-year-old composer dropped out of the Paris Conservatoire and enlisted in the French army. His close friend and collaborator at the time, the poet Contamine de Latour, claimed Satie had persisted with his hated Conservatory courses only so he could qualify for a student exemption that would reduce his five years' compulsory military service to one year in the reserves. Satie was duly assigned as a reservist to the 33rd Infantry Regiment at the Citadel in Arras, nicknamed La belle inutile ("The Useless Beauty") for its fine architecture and lack of strategic importance. But even this comparatively mild duty proved too onerous for his liking. He sought to make himself ill by sneaking out of his barracks at night and strolling about bare-chested in the winter air, with the result that he came down with a severe case of bronchitis. By April 1887 he was back at his family's home in Paris on a two-month medical leave.

Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarabandes_(Satie)).

Although originally written for Solo Piano, I created this arrangement of the Tres Sarabandes (3 Sarabands) for Flute & Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello)