Music/Scale/Minor/Hungarian

• Hungarian Minor Scale

  • Also called Gypsy minor and double harmonic minor. On C: C D E♭ F♯ G A♭ B. Steps in semitones: 2 1 3 1 1 3 1. Music/Scale/Minor/Harmonic with a raised fourth.

  • History

    • The name comes from the nineteenth-century style hongrois: the verbunkos idiom that Romani bands played in Hungarian cities, which Person/Franz Liszt, Person/Johannes Brahms and Person/Franz Schubert borrowed. Liszt's book on the subject, Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (18/5/9), credited that music to the Roma.
    • Person/Béla Bartók and Person/Zoltán Kodály's fieldwork after 1905 found that older Hungarian peasant song was largely pentatonic. The "Hungarian" in the scale's name therefore names an urban, Romani-performed popular style rather than Hungarian village song. See Music/Scale/Pentatonic/Minor.

  • Use

    • Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies and the "alla zingarese" finales of Brahms and Person/Joseph Haydn draw on the idiom, usually as melodic color over functional harmony in harmonic minor.
    • Its two augmented seconds, ♭3–♯4 and ♭6–7, make it a quick shorthand for Eastern Europe in film and game scores.

  • Quirks

    • It has two leading tones: F♯ leads to G and B leads to C. A melody can cadence on the dominant as strongly as on the tonic.
    • The step pattern 2 1 3 1 1 3 1 read backward is a rotation of itself, so the collection maps onto itself under inversion.
    • It is the fourth mode of the double harmonic major scale (C D♭ E F G A♭ B), which Arabic theory associates with maqam Hijaz Kar.