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Canon in D

J. Pachelbel

By Mayank Sanganeria

In D major, this piece is 202 chord changes across 102 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 61 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.

• Chord inversions 31× bar 29: iii7 (A) (first inversion, bass A2) · bar 37: iii7 (A) (first inversion, bass A2) · bar 38: IV7 (B) (first inversion, bass B2)
• Seventh chords 40× bar 13: V7 — A-dominant seventh chord · bar 14: iii7 — F#-minor seventh chord · bar 16: V7 — A-dominant seventh chord

Free scores

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