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The Irish Rover

Traditional

By Mayank Sanganeria

In C major, this piece is 25 chord changes across 20 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 15 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 14× bar 2: vi7 (C) (first inversion, bass C3) · bar 3: vi7 (C) (first inversion, bass C3) · bar 4: I7 (B) (third inversion, bass B2)
• Seventh chords 15× bar 2: vi7 (C) — A-minor seventh chord · bar 3: vi7 (C) — A-minor seventh chord · bar 4: I7 (B) — C-major seventh chord
• Pedal points 4× bar 1: C3 held bars 1–3 under I, vi7 (C) · bar 5: C3 held bars 5–8 under I, vi7 (C), iv (C) · bar 9: C3 held bars 9–13 under I, vi7 (C), I7

Free scores

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