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The Little Hunter's Song (Album for the Young, Op. 68 No. 7)

R. Schumann

By Mayank Sanganeria

In F major, this piece is 37 chord changes across 30 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 33 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 3× bar 8: V7/V · bar 16: V7/vi · bar 17: V7/vi
• Chord inversions 14× bar 1: i (C) (second inversion, bass C3) · bar 2: i (C) (second inversion, bass C3) · bar 3: vi7 (F) (first inversion, bass F3)
• Seventh chords 14× bar 3: vi7 (F) — D-minor seventh chord · bar 8: V7/V — G-dominant seventh chord · bar 12: V7 — C-dominant seventh chord
• Pedal points 5× bar 0: C3 held bars 0–2 under v, i (C) · bar 8: C4 held bars 8–10 under V, v · bar 11: C3 held bars 11–13 under v, V7, I (C)

Free scores

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