Classical music on kalimba

The great tunes of classical music sound lovely on a kalimba: its soft, ringing tines suit slow themes like Pachelbel's Canon, Brahms' Lullaby or Debussy's Clair de Lune, and lively ones like the Can-Can or Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Each tab here is the melody alone, arranged for the 17-key kalimba in C: no chords, no left hand, no sharps or flats. Where the original goes outside the kalimba's notes, it is moved to C major and kept to the tune everybody hums.

The list goes from the easiest to the longest. Beethoven's Ode to Joy and Grieg's Morning Mood come first: they move step by step on a few middle tines. The last ones jump further and use the dotted numbers, the short tines of the next octave. These pieces have no words, so the video matters even more: listen to it once, then follow it slowly, a line at a time, and hum the tune as you play to keep the rhythm.

All these works are in the public domain: their composers died long ago, so the tabs, videos and PDFs are free to print and share, in class too.