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The Entertainer

S. Joplin

By Mayank Sanganeria

In C major, this piece is 98 chord changes across 92 bars under the notes on the page — a intermediate-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 84 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 17× bar 5: V7/IV (G) · bar 9: V7/IV (G) · bar 11: V7/V
• Borrowed chords 3× bar 3: bVI · bar 18: bVI · bar 52: bVI
• Color chords 3× bar 34: #ii7 (F) · bar 68: #v7 (Db) · bar 72: #ii7 (F)
• Chord inversions 40× bar 1: vi7 (G) (third inversion, bass G4) · bar 2: vi7 (G) (third inversion, bass G3) · bar 5: V7/IV (G) (second inversion, bass G2)
• Seventh chords 40× bar 1: vi7 (G) — A-minor seventh chord · bar 2: vi7 (G) — A-minor seventh chord · bar 5: V7/IV (G) — C-dominant seventh chord
• Modulation 1× bar 69: bars 69–75: F major (r=0.93)
• Pedal points 1× bar 78: G2 held bars 78–81 under I (G), V7

Free scores

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