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Invention No. 1 in C, BWV 772

J. S. Bach

By Mayank Sanganeria

In C major, this piece is 42 chord changes across 23 bars under the notes on the page — a advanced-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 87 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 6× bar 5: V7/V (C) · bar 8: V7/V · bar 12: V7/V (A)
• Chord inversions 27× bar 3: I7 (B) (third inversion, bass B3) · bar 3: ii7 (C) (third inversion, bass C4) · bar 3: iii (G) (first inversion, bass G3)
• Seventh chords 27× bar 1: I7 — C-major seventh chord · bar 2: V7 — G-dominant seventh chord · bar 3: I7 (B) — C-major seventh chord
• Modulation 1× bar 1: bars 1–10: G major (r=0.93)

Free scores

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