Inversion (music)

In music theory, an inversion is a rearrangement of the top-to-bottom elements in an interval, a chord, a melody, or a group of contrapuntal lines of music. In each of these cases, "inversion" has a distinct but related meaning. The concept of inversion also plays an important role in musical set theory.

For other uses, see Inversion (disambiguation).
An example of melodic inversion from the fugue in D minor from J.S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. Though they start on different pitches (A and E), the second highlighted melody is the upside-down version of the first highlighted melody. That is, when the first goes up, the second goes down the same number of diatonic steps (with some chromatic alteration); and when the first goes down, the second goes up the same number of steps.
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