Ah, scales. Arguably the single most enduring music lesson you’ll ever be taught is your scales. They’re among the first things you learn, and are used throughout your musical education and career. From songwriting to warming up, scales are one of the most important elements of learning and playing music. But one of the most interesting things about scales is that they can be different based on the culture the music comes from. You see, thousands and thousands of years ago, people all over Africa, Europe, Asia, and all over the world discovered, independent of one another, the connections between tones. Eventually, some scales fell out of use, while others became long standing fixtures in their culture. And this week, we’re going to take a look at some of the scales used around the world!
What is a Scale?
Before we get started, we need to define what a scale actually is. All musical-sounding scales are made up of a small group of notes, usually five to seven intervals (six to eight notes) to each octave. The word “octave” originally described the span of the eight-note order of tones and semi-tones. But now it’s used to describe the interval associated with a frequency ratio of 2 to 1. Basically, what that means is, no matter if a scale has 5, 6, 7, 8, or 42 notes in it, the span from the lowest note to the highest note is called an octave. The notes that make up each scale usually have a simple relationship to the first note in the scale. This relationship is usually based on sound frequency ratios, which is delving into the world of music theory, which we’re going to try to stay away from this week. You can play pretty much any widely used musical scale on a piano or guitar, no matter what culture it came from.
Octatonic Scale
Commonly found in jazz and modern classical music, as well as early 20th century Russian and Dutch music, the octatonic scale is any scale that uses eight notes. This is usually made up of notes ascending in alternating intervals of whole step and half step, creating a nice, symmetric scale, which means it can easily be divided into octaves.
Heptatonic Scale
Western music uses a few scales, but the most common of them fall into the category of “heptatonic” scales. This means there are seven pitches per octave. This is something you’re probably familiar with, even if you don’t know it! Everyone has sung “do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do!” That’s the Western music major scale. It’s made up of 7 unique notes, with the eighth and final note being the octave. Heptatonic scales can be found in Western, Roman, Spanish, Hungarian, and Greek music, among others. The Western key signatures lend themselves well to the heptatonic sclaes.
Hexatonic Scale
Found in Irish, Scottish, and other folk traditions, as well as blues and jazz music, the hexatonic scale uses 6 notes or pitches per octave. A few famous examples include the “whole tone scale,” which is made up of C D E F# G# A# C; the “augmented scale,” C D# E G A♭ B C, the “Prometheus scale,” C D E F# A B♭ A; and the “blues scale,” C E♭ F G♭ G B♭ C.
Pentatonic Scale
Another common musical scale found all over the world is the pentatonic scale. Differing from the seven-note heptatonic scale and the 6-note hexatonic scale, this one uses only 5 notes per octave. Pentatonic scales are generally divided into those with semitones and those without. Thanks to their relative simplicity, pentatonic scales are often introduced to beginner musicians.
And it may very well be this simplicity that has lead to this scale being so widely used around the world. In fact, pentatonic scales can be found in Celtic, English, German, American, Nordic, Hungarian, Croatian, and West African folk music, the music of ancient Greece, Turkic, Mongolic, Chinese, Korean, Laotian, Japanese, and Vietnamese music, as well as Gospel, Bluegrass, Jazz, Blues, Rock, and children’s songs, like nursery rhymes.
Tetratonic Scale
In contrast to heptatonic and pentatonic scales, which are fairly common, the tertatonic scale isn’t used very much anymore in today’s modern world. Characterized by only four notes per octave, this sort of scale is usually associated with ancient, prehistoric music.
The widespread use of this scale in early human history is quite interesting. It was commonly used among the Plains Indians of North America. It was especially common among the Arapaho, Blackfoot, Crow, Omaha, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Sioux peoples. Outside of North America, cultures all over the world utilized this scale, including the Maori of New Zealand, the peoples of Polynesia and Melanesia, in Africa, especially in Uganda, the tribal peoples of India, in Russia, and across Western Europe, especially throughout Scandinavia.
This scale isn’t used much today, except rarely in art music. An example of an art-music piece based on a tetratonic scale would be Reed Phase by Steve Reich. It’s an early minimalist work based entirely on a single cell of five notes, repeated throughout the piece. Because the “A” note appears twice in this pattern, there are only four pitches all together.
Monotonic Scale
I’m sure you’ve sensed the pattern by now, and can guess that the monotonic scale uses only a single note in the octave. This is a very strange and uncommon scale form, but is nevertheless used as a musical form. In fact, by using a deliberate fixed note, the monotonic scale isn’t considered a total absence of melody.
The monotonic scale was most commonly used in early Christian spiritual practices. It’s been speculated that this scale was used in the recitation of Psalms. Some believe that this ceremonial recitation began as everyone in the congregation speaking the words of the Psalms in unison. This would have inevitably caused a lot of vocal chaos. It’s believed that the introduction of the monotonic recitation was used to help fight that chaos. In essence, it would have given everyone in the crowd a fixed note they could all use to recite the words, giving men and women an octave between them.
Each of these scales has a number of scales that can fit into their category, but trying to describe each of them would be a lesson in music theory, a subject that requires a lot more space, time, and understanding than we have available to us here.
If you’re looking to experiment with your music making, try playing music created using scales other than those your familiar with. It can only help you to improve more!
