Common scale types

Pentatonic (five-note) scales are used more widely than any other scale formation. In fact, Western art music is one of the few traditions in which pentatonic scales do not predominate. Their frequency is especially notable in the Far East and in European folk music. The most common varieties of pentatonic scales use major seconds and minor thirds, with no half steps (anhemitonic). A representative type could be spelled C–D–E–G–A, for example. The pentatonic scale is so pervasive that melodies exhibiting tetratonic (four-note) scales often appear to be pentatonic with one pitch omitted. Hexatonic (six-note) scales appear rather rarely in folk music and nonliterate cultures. Examples that are known often seem to be fragments of the seven-note Western diatonic scale.

Heptatonic scales are especially prominent in the world’s art-music traditions. The tone systems of India, Iran, and the West are entirely heptatonic, and seven-note scales are also present in the art music of some cultures that do not use such scales exclusively (e.g., the ritsu scale in Japan and the pelog scale in Java).

With some exceptions in both the distant and the recent past, Western art music has been based largely on one heptatonic scale, known as the diatonic scale. The origins of this scale can be traced to ancient Greece, and it has been formulated to some extent according to acoustical principles. Since the octave in Western music is normally divided into 12 equal half steps, the characteristic intervals of the diatonic scale can be constructed upon any one of the 12 pitches. Such transpositions of the scale are known as keys.

Before the 17th century, as many as 12 different mode permutations of the diatonic scale were in common use, but only two modes—now called major and minor—have been in general use during most of the past 300 years. The diatonic scale itself consists of five whole steps (W) and two half steps (H), with the half steps dividing the whole steps into groups of two or three. The major scale uses the sequence W–W–H–W–W–W–H, as shown in the first of the following examples, while the intervals in the minor scale are W–H–W–W–H–W–W, as in the second.

In actual music the minor scale is usually altered in one of two ways to create greater emphasis on particular pitches. In the harmonic minor scale (the third example shown) the seventh note is raised one half step, and in the melodic minor scale (the fourth example) both the sixth and seventh notes are raised by one half step in ascending patterns while they are left unaltered in descending patterns (the fifth example).

In the 19th and 20th centuries, composers made increasing use of pitches lying outside the diatonic scale, and that tendency stimulated the development of a variety of novel scale systems as alternatives to the diatonic scale. Principles for composition within the chromatic scale (consisting of all of the 12 half steps within the octave) were first articulated by Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg early in the 20th century. Other scales have also been employed on an experimental basis. The whole-tone scale (comprising six whole steps) was used prominently by French composer Claude Debussy and others, especially in France and England. Microtonal scales, requiring intervals smaller than the conventional half step, also appeared sporadically in the 20th century. Among microtonal structures, the most important, perhaps, have been scales calling for quarter tones (equal to half the distance of a half step).

Other uses of the term scale

The word scale is sometimes used to describe musical passages consisting of a succession of consecutive scale degrees in ascending or descending patterns. It is also used to describe scalelike exercises that are practiced for the development of technical proficiency on a musical instrument. Scale can refer in rare instances to the ordering of some musical element other than pitch. An example is the term Klangfarbenmelodie, used in some music to denote a carefully arranged succession of different tone colours.