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Melody (Album for the Young, Op. 68 No. 1)

R. Schumann

By Mayank Sanganeria

In C major, this piece is 37 chord changes across 20 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 14 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 17× bar 2: I (E) (first inversion, bass E4) · bar 5: V7 (D) (second inversion, bass D4) · bar 6: V7 (B) (first inversion, bass B3)
• Seventh chords 23× bar 1: I7 — C-major seventh chord · bar 2: ii7 — D-minor seventh chord · bar 4: V7 — G-major seventh chord

Free scores

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