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Sonatina in G, Anh. 5 No. 1

L. v. Beethoven

By Mayank Sanganeria

In G major, this piece is 33 chord changes across 34 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 39 of 97 in the library, ranked easiest to hardest. Reduced to block chords, that's a progression you can learn in a sitting; the piece you're reading is that progression wearing figuration.

Practice this piece → Practice chords → Learn it section by section → Hear the harmony → Sight-read something new →

What's inside the harmony

Reducing the piece to block chords and labeling every change turns up harmonic phenomena that are easy to miss reading the figuration straight — each one below is also its own corpus-wide census.

• Secondary dominants 2× bar 5: V7/IV · bar 21: V7/IV
• Chord inversions 17× bar 3: I (D) (second inversion, bass D3) · bar 4: iii7 (D) (first inversion, bass D3) · bar 6: ii7 (G) (third inversion, bass G3)
• Seventh chords 17× bar 4: iii7 (D) — B-minor seventh chord · bar 5: V7/IV — G-dominant seventh chord · bar 6: ii7 (G) — A-minor seventh chord
• Pedal points 2× bar 13: D3 held bars 13–15 under V7, vi7 (D), iii7 (D) · bar 25: D3 held bars 25–31 under v, I (D), V, V7

Free scores

• Blocked-chord reduction (MusicXML) — the harmony skeleton the player performs
• The piece as written (compressed MusicXML)