Exotic scales

Western concert music lived for centuries on two families of scales: the modes and the major-minor system. But many folk melodies are built on other scales, and those are the ones the books call exotic scales (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVII).

The name says more about who is looking than about the scale. A scale is only exotic seen from European concert music; for someone who has sung with it since childhood it is the home scale. The books use the word in a technical sense, "outside the major-minor system", and that is the sense it has here.

From the nineteenth century on, composers went looking for these scales, and Lacerda gives two reasons in a footnote to his chapter (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVII):

• the nationalists wanted to give their music the character of their country, and found in folk music scales that concert music did not use;
• others, with no nationalist aim, wanted to lend an exotic flavour to a particular work.

Blatter tells the same search from the other end: what composers found was traditional music from around the world, and scales they invented themselves, which gave fresh sounds without moving too far from the foundations of Western music (Blatter 2007, part 2, art. 10).

The augmented second

Much of the flavour of these scales comes from an interval the major scale does not have: the augmented second, a leap of three semitones between two neighbouring notes. You have met it already in harmonic minor, between the sixth and seventh degrees. In A harmonic minor it is the step from F to G sharp:

Hear the scale

In a scale of tones and semitones the steps are one or two semitones. The augmented second opens a gap of three in the middle of the scale, and the Western ear recognises it at once as "oriental", "gypsy", "Arab". The scales below have two augmented seconds instead of one.

The gypsy scale

Lacerda describes the gypsy scale as harmonic minor with the fourth degree raised by a semitone (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVII). In G harmonic minor, C becomes C sharp:

Hear the scale

Raising it creates a second augmented second, from B flat to C sharp, and the scale ends up with two symmetrical gaps, one in each half. On the staff each gap sits between two neighbouring letters, B flat and C sharp, E flat and F sharp: a second, only augmented, and not a third.

Hear the passage

Liszt used this scale in his Hungarian Rhapsody No. 3 (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVII).

Med reaches the same scale the same way: he starts from natural minor, raises the seventh degree to get harmonic minor, and then raises the fourth (Med 1996, ch. XXXV). He calls it the gypsy minor, because he also describes a gypsy major, built from the major scale: lower the sixth degree, then the second (Med 1996, ch. XXXV). On C:

Hear the scale

The gypsy major has a perfect symmetry: the two halves of the scale, C–D flat–E–F and G–A flat–B–C, make the same pattern, semitone, augmented second, semitone. Med notes that it is also called the Arabic scale and that it appears in Greek, Hungarian and Slovak folk music (Med 1996, ch. XXXV).

The Neapolitan scale

The Neapolitan minor, or Sicilian, scale is harmonic minor with the second degree lowered (Med 1996, ch. XXXV). On C, D becomes D flat, and the scale opens with a semitone right above the tonic:

Hear the scale

Blatter lists it among the seven-note scales that contain intervals larger than a whole tone, together with harmonic minor, which does too (Blatter 2007, part 2, art. 10).

One pattern, several names

These scales are the ground where the books agree least about names. The same sequence of intervals, harmonic minor with a raised fourth, is called:

Where	Name
Lacerda	gypsy scale
Med	gypsy minor, also "Asbein", which he describes as the best-known Arabic mode
Blatter	Hungarian minor

The first name is Lacerda's (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVII). The second is Med's (Med 1996, ch. XXXV). The third comes from Blatter's list of scales (Blatter 2007, part 2, art. 10). Med's gypsy major is, in English-language texts, the double harmonic scale, because it has the augmented second of harmonic minor twice. And Blatter warns that many of the scales he gathers carry the name of a people or a tradition, to the extent that their origin is known, and that others have no known origin (Blatter 2007, part 2, art. 10).

The practical lesson is to remember the intervals, not the names. "Gypsy" can mean two different scales in two books; "semitone, augmented second, semitone" means the same thing in any of them.

Six-note scales

A scale of six notes is a hexatonic scale, and the name says only that: six notes (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVII). It turns up, for instance, in African American folk music and in Brazilian folk melodies, and it usually looks like a seven-note scale with one note missing.

One kind of hexatonic scale earns a name of its own: the whole-tone scale, made only of whole tones, with no semitone at all (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVII).

Hear the scale

With no semitone, no note pulls towards another, and the scale has no tonic that imposes itself: Med calls it "non-functional", because no tonic, dominant or subdominant can be felt in it (Med 1996, ch. XXXV). It sounds suspended, as if the melody were floating. And divided into equal tones, the octave holds only two different whole-tone scales, one through C and one through C sharp (Blatter 2007, part 2, art. 10).

Who brought it into concert music? The books do not say the same thing:

• Lacerda says it was Debussy, who heard it from Javanese musicians (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVII);
• Med says it appears before Debussy, in Glinka and in Liszt (Med 1996, ch. XXXV);
• Blatter associates it with Debussy and the impressionist and post-impressionist composers (Blatter 2007, part 2, art. 10).

The three claims fit together. The scale existed before Debussy, and he was not the first to write it; but it was with him that it stopped being a curiosity and became a characteristic sound, the sound people now link with impressionism.

And the others

Exotic scales do not stop here. The pentatonic, of five notes, is the most widespread of all, and the books include it in this family (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVII); it has a topic of its own. Blatter also lists seven-note scales made of five tones and two semitones in unusual orders, eight-note scales and scales of nine notes or more (Blatter 2007, part 2, art. 10), and Med records "mathematical" scales, built by repeating the same group of intervals (Med 1996, ch. XXXV).

The whole-tone scale is exactly a scale of that kind: a single interval repeated until the octave closes. Scales made of a repeating pattern, and what that symmetry does to the sound, come next.