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Lullaby (Wiegenlied)

J. Brahms

By Mayank Sanganeria

In D-flat major, this piece is 17 chord changes across 17 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 6 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 1× bar 13: V7/IV
• Seventh chords 9× bar 4: I7 — Db-major seventh chord · bar 5: V7 — Ab-dominant seventh chord · bar 6: V7 — Ab-dominant seventh chord
• Modulation 1× bar 1: bars 1–10: C# major (r=0.87)
• Pedal points 1× bar 1: D-3 held bars 1–4 under I, I7

Free scores

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