Remix · A piece with no chord progression, by design

Custom-tuning remix · free

Da Pacem Domine — reimagined in Open D Minor

Originally by Arvo Pärt (2004, SATB choir, written two days after the Madrid bombings) Tuning used here Open D Minor (free, one of the 33 built-ins) Key idea tintinnabuli technique locks one voice to a single triad for the entire piece — here, all six open strings already are that triad

This is a cappella choir music, set to a plucked custom tuning — no guitar involved in the original at all. But the pairing is about as exact a match as this site has made: Pärt's tintinnabuli technique restricts one voice (the "T-voice") to only the three notes of one fixed tonic triad for the entire piece, and both real melodic voices in Da Pacem Domine are confirmed elaborations of a D minor triad. Open D Minor tuning rings that exact triad — D, F, A — on every open string, untouched.

There isn't really a "chord progression" to transcribe here, and that's the entire point. Tintinnabuli was Pärt's answer to years of creative silence: strip harmony down to a single triad, treat it like a set of bells, and let a plain scalar melody move around it. But Da Pacem Domine stacks that one triad against three real, distinct medieval techniques at once, which is what actually makes the piece — not a chord chart. The alto carries the original 9th-century Gregorian chant note for note (a cantus firmus), the bass shadows it in parallel 10ths the whole way through (organum, the earliest form of European harmony, from a 9th-century treatise), and the soprano and tenor split a single melodic line between them so that when one sings, the other rests — hocket, a device out of the 13th-century Notre Dame school, named for the French word for hiccup. Every phrase then lands on a faux-bourdon cadence — the exact "parallel 6/3 chords" technique of Guillaume de Machaut, three centuries before Pärt was born — which is the one moment the tintinnabuli triad actually moves.

So the reason this page is only one triad isn't a shortcut — four real 9th-to-14th-century techniques are layered on top of that triad simultaneously, and none of them require a second chord to exist. It's less a piece with no harmony and more a piece where the harmony was never the point.

Dm Dm/F Dm/A

Three inversions of the exact same D minor triad — root position, first inversion, second inversion — which is genuinely most of the harmonic vocabulary tintinnabuli allows itself.

The one triad this entire piece is built from, in all three inversions, root in the bass throughout — no Pro unlock needed.

Remix with Open—Shape

Every voicing verified against the app's own voicing engine in the real Open D Minor tuning, with the true bass note under each inversion.