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On the tongue: one of Satie’s whimsical directions in Gnossienne No. 1 — an image for the player, not an instrumental technique.
Printed above the staff among other poetic directions, with no conventional scope: in Satie’s unbarred Gnossiennes, phrases such as très luisant, questionnez, du bout de la pensée and sur la langue sit over individual phrases and are never formally cancelled.
Satie’s Gnossienne directions are images rather than instructions with a fixed meaning: sur la langue suggests something tasted or spoken softly, and each pianist decides what it means for touch and timing. If you borrow the practice, accept that you are inviting interpretation rather than specifying a result. For wind flutter-tonguing, the standard terms are Flatterzunge or flz., not sur la langue.
Satie, Gnossienne No. 1, piano: “sur la langue”, one of the directions that replace conventional markings in this unbarred piece, beside “très luisant”, “questionnez” and “du bout de la pensée”.
Sur la langue is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
Browse the full dictionary →