Music/Scale/Pentatonic/Minor

• Minor Pentatonic Scale

  • Also called la-pentatonic in Kodály solmization and yu mode in Chinese theory. On C: C E♭ F G B♭. Steps in semitones: 3 2 2 3 2. The fifth mode of Music/Scale/Pentatonic/Major.

  • History

    • Person/Béla Bartók and Kodály's fieldwork after 1905 found that the oldest layer of Hungarian peasant song is in a minor pentatonic, often with a melody that repeats a fifth lower in its second half. Bartók set out that finding in The Hungarian Folk Song (1924). It overturned the nineteenth-century assumption that Hungarian music meant the style hongrois of Music/Scale/Minor/Hungarian.
    • The scale is also the foundation of blues and rock melody, where Music/Scale/Blues adds a ♭5 to it.

  • Use

    • Rock and blues guitar organize improvisation around five fingerboard patterns of this scale, the "boxes".
    • Over a dominant seventh chord, the ♭3 grates against the chord's major third. Blues players treat that clash as the idiom.
    • Kodály pedagogy uses la-pentatonic for early minor-mode songs.

  • Quirks

    • Every note of the scale is a chord tone or tension of a minor eleventh chord on the tonic (C E♭ G B♭ F), so the scale can be played over that chord with no avoid notes.