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Gymnopédie No. 1

E. Satie

By Mayank Sanganeria

In D major, this piece is 82 chord changes across 78 bars under the notes on the page — a intermediate-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 82 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 4× bar 26: V7/IV · bar 31: V7/IV · bar 65: V7/IV
• Borrowed chords 1× bar 76: biii (E)
• Chord inversions 18× bar 23: ii7 (D) (third inversion, bass D2) · bar 24: ii7 (D) (third inversion, bass D2) · bar 25: v (C) (first inversion, bass C3)
• Seventh chords 40× bar 1: IV7 — G-major seventh chord · bar 2: I7 — D-major seventh chord · bar 3: IV7 — G-major seventh chord
• Pedal points 2× bar 35: E2 held bars 35–37 under V (E), iii7 (E), iii (E) · bar 73: E2 held bars 73–76 under bIII7 (E), v (E), biii (E)

Free scores

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