Music/Scale/Whole Tone

• Whole Tone Scale

  • Also Person/Olivier Messiaen's first mode of limited transposition. On C: C D E F♯ G♯ A♯. Steps in semitones: 2 2 2 2 2 2.

  • History

    • Glinka used a descending whole-tone scale for the sorcerer Chernomor in Ruslan and Lyudmila (18/4/2), and Russian composers after him kept it for the supernatural.
    • Person/Claude Debussy made it a harmonic field. "Voiles" (Préludes, Book I, 1909–1910) stays on one whole-tone collection for most of its length and turns pentatonic in the middle.
    • Messiaen listed it first among his modes of limited transposition in Technique de mon langage musical (1944), and said he avoided it because Debussy and Dukas had used it so thoroughly.

  • Use

    • Impressionist harmony, and later film and television, use it for dreams, flashbacks and suspended time.
    • Jazz uses it over a dominant seventh chord with a ♯5 and 9 (C7♯5, C9♯5), and Person/Thelonious Monk made descending whole-tone runs a signature.

  • Quirks

    • There are only two distinct whole-tone collections, the even and the odd pitch classes. Every rotation of the scale is the same scale, so it has no modes. On a device with root selection, the twelve roots produce only two sets of pitches.
    • It contains no perfect fifth, no leading tone and no minor or major triad; every triad built from it is augmented. No note can function as a tonic without help from outside the scale.
    • The French augmented sixth chord (A♭ C D F♯ in C) is a four-note subset of the scale, a pivot between functional and whole-tone harmony.