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Londonderry Air (Danny Boy)

Traditional

By Mayank Sanganeria

In E-flat major, this piece is 23 chord changes across 18 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 10 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 4: V7/V · bar 5: V7/IV · bar 13: V7/IV
• Chord inversions 15× bar 1: vi7 (Eb) (first inversion, bass E-2) · bar 2: ii7 (Ab) (first inversion, bass A-2) · bar 3: vi7 (G) (second inversion, bass G2)
• Seventh chords 21× bar 1: vi7 (Eb) — C-minor seventh chord · bar 2: ii7 (Ab) — F-minor seventh chord · bar 3: vi7 (G) — C-minor seventh chord
• Pedal points 1× bar 8: E-2 held bars 8–10 under vi7 (Eb), I7

Free scores

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