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Soldiers' March (Album for the Young, Op. 68 No. 2)

R. Schumann

By Mayank Sanganeria

In G major, this piece is 51 chord changes across 32 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 35 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 7: viio/V · bar 8: V7/V · bar 15: viio/V
• Chord inversions 15× bar 2: I (B) (first inversion, bass B3) · bar 3: viio (A) (first inversion, bass A3) · bar 6: I (B) (first inversion, bass B3)
• Seventh chords 8× bar 4: V7 — D-dominant seventh chord · bar 8: V7/V — A-dominant seventh chord · bar 12: V7 — D-dominant seventh chord

Free scores

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