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When the Saints Go Marching In

Traditional

By Mayank Sanganeria

In C major, this piece is 18 chord changes across 19 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 13 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 13× bar 2: vi (C) (first inversion, bass C3) · bar 4: vi (C) (first inversion, bass C3) · bar 6: vi7 (C) (first inversion, bass C3)
• Seventh chords 12× bar 2: vi (C) — A-incomplete minor-seventh chord · bar 4: vi (C) — A-incomplete minor-seventh chord · bar 6: vi7 (C) — A-minor seventh chord
• Pedal points 2× bar 2: C3 held bars 2–7 under vi (C), I, vi7 (C) · bar 14: C3 held bars 14–19 under vi7 (C), vi (C), I, i

Free scores

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