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Arabesque, Op. 100 No. 2

F. Burgmüller

By Mayank Sanganeria

In A minor, this piece is 35 chord changes across 33 bars under the notes on the page — a intermediate-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 72 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 8: V7/III · bar 9: V7/III
• Chord inversions 13× bar 5: iv (A) (second inversion, bass A3) · bar 7: III (G) (second inversion, bass G3) · bar 12: V (G#) (first inversion, bass G#3)
• Seventh chords 4× bar 8: V7/III — G-dominant seventh chord · bar 9: V7/III — G-dominant seventh chord · bar 18: iv7 — D-minor seventh chord
• Modulation 1× bar 8: bars 8–12: C major (r=0.9)
• Pedal points 3× bar 1: A3 held bars 1–6 under i, iv (A) · bar 7: G3 held bars 7–9 under III (G), V7/III · bar 20: A3 held bars 20–31 under i, iv (A)

Free scores

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