Music/Scale/Minor/Harmonic
Properties
- logseq-entity
- Logseq/Entity/Music/Scale
- scale-semitones-above-tonic
- 0 2 3 5 7 8 11
Harmonic Minor Scale
- On C: C D E♭ F G A♭ B. Steps in semitones: 2 1 2 2 1 3 1. Music/Scale/Minor/Natural with a raised seventh.
History
- The raised seventh came from cadential practice: musica ficta supplied a leading tone at cadences in modal polyphony long before any theorist listed the result as a scale.
- "Harmonic minor" is a nineteenth-century pedagogical name. It collects the pitches of the chords of a minor key, with the dominant and leading-tone chords built on the raised seventh.
Use
- Common-practice harmony uses the collection for V, V7 and vii°7 in minor. Its melodies avoid the augmented second between ♭6 and 7, or fill it in, or turn it into a deliberate effect.
- Nineteenth-century exoticism made that augmented second a marker of the East, Spain or Romani music.
- Its fifth mode, C D♭ E F G A♭ B♭ on C, is Phrygian dominant. Flamenco, klezmer (where it is called Freygish or Ahava Rabbah) and Middle Eastern pop use it, and the maqam Hijaz is close to it.
- Its fourth mode is Music/Scale/Dorian/Ukrainian.
Quirks
- The collection contains a fully diminished seventh chord (B D F A♭) and an augmented triad (E♭ G B). Those two symmetrical chords give it more harmonic ambiguity than the diatonic modes.
- The MicroFreak manual lists its "Harmonic Minor" setting as C D E F G A♭ B. With E natural, that collection is harmonic major, Person/Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's name for a major scale with a lowered sixth. The manual page is Microfreak/UG/15 Using Scales/01 Scale Settings; which collection the firmware plays is not documented there.