Music/Scale/Minor/Melodic

• Melodic Minor Scale

  • Also called jazz minor and, in its ascending form, the acoustic collection. On C, ascending: C D E♭ F G A B. Steps in semitones: 2 1 2 2 2 2 1. The classical descending form is Music/Scale/Minor/Natural.

  • History

    • The classical form records voice leading. Raising both sixth and seventh on the way up avoids the augmented second of Music/Scale/Minor/Harmonic while keeping the leading tone. Lowering both on the way down lets the line fall toward the dominant.
    • Baroque lines follow the harmony more than the direction. Over a dominant chord, Person/Johann Sebastian Bach's descending lines keep the raised sixth and seventh.
    • Twentieth-century jazz theory uses the ascending form in both directions and treats each of its modes as a chord-scale. Person/George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953) brought Lydian-based thinking into that theory.

  • Use

    • Its modes cover much of jazz harmony beyond the diatonic system:
      • Mode 1, melodic minor on its own tonic, fits a minor-major seventh chord.
      • Mode 3, Lydian augmented, fits a major seventh chord with a sharp fifth.
      • Mode 4, Lydian dominant, fits a dominant seventh chord with a sharp eleventh, such as a tritone substitute.
      • Mode 6, Locrian ♮2, fits a half-diminished chord.
      • Mode 7, the altered scale or super Locrian, fits a dominant seventh chord with altered ninths and fifths.

  • Quirks

    • The fourth mode, C D E F♯ G A B♭ on C, approximates harmonics 8 through 14 of a fundamental on C. Writers on Person/Béla Bartók call it the acoustic or overtone scale for that reason.
    • The collection is one note away from both the major scale (lowered third) and Dorian (raised seventh).