Scales

In music, a scale is a group of musical notes that provides material for part or all of a musical work. Scales are ordered in pitch or pitch class, with their ordering providing a measure of musical distance. more...

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Scales differ from modes in that scales do not have a primary or "tonic" note. Thus a single scale can have many different modes, depending on which of its notes is chosen as primary. The distance between two successive notes in a scale is called a "scale step." Composers often transform musical patterns by moving every note in the pattern by a constant number of scale steps: thus, in the C major scale, the pattern C-D-E ("doe, a deer") might be shifted up a single scale step to become D-E-F ("ray, a drop"). This process is called scalar transposition. Since the steps of a scale can have various sizes, this process introduces subtle melodic and harmonic variation into the music. This variation is what gives scalar music much of its complexity.

Background

Scales are typically listed from low to high. A scale is octave-repeating when every pitch in the scale appears in every possible octave. An octave-repeating scale can be represented as a circular arrangement of pitch classes, ordered by increasing (or decreasing) pitch class. For instance, the increasing C major scale is, C-D-E-F-G-A-B-, with the bracket indicating that the last note is an octave higher than the first note. Or C-B-A-G-F-E-D-, with the bracket indicating an octave lower then the first note in the scale.

This single scale can be manifested at many different pitch levels. For example a C major scale can be started at C4 (middle C; see scientific pitch notation) and ascending an octave to C5; or it could be started at C6, ascending an octave to C7.

Scales may be described according to the intervals they contain:

for example: diatonic, chromatic, whole tone;

or by the number of different pitch classes they contain:

very common: pentatonic, hexatonic, heptatonic have five, six, and seven tone scales, respectively.; used in prehistoric music: ditonic or two, tritonic or three, tetratonic or four; used in jazz and modern classical music: octatonic or eight.;

Scales can be abstracted from performance or composition. They are also often used precompositionally to guide or limit a composition. Explicit instruction in scales has been part of compositional training for many centuries. One or more scales may be used in a composition, such as in Claude Debussy's L'Isle Joyeuse. Below, the first scale is a whole tone scale, while the second and third scales are diatonic scales. All three are used in the opening pages of Debussy's piece.

Read more at Wikipedia.org