There are only three octatonic ("half-whole") diminished scales, and two have reasonably well-known applications over everyday chords. What about the third?

Samuel Andreyev has just done a nice video about Hindemith that reminded me of how much I like him. He's also a great antidote to all the misty, smeary, billowy late-Romantic/Impressionist stuff I've been listening to lately so I thought it would be worth doing a round-up of some good things in the same vein.

Yesterday I posted some initial thoughts on the "whole tone dominants" -- those altered dominant chords that are subsets of the whole tone scale. The obvious other thing to do, particularly with my current obsession with Scriabin, is to look at the "octatonic dominants" that come out of the half-whole (or whole-half) diminished scale. Caveat: this post is a bit of "primary research" -- not very exciting as at stands, but with potentially useful applications.

I've been spending a lot of time watching classical music videos on YouTube recently, and something I find very hard to ignore is the comments. People hate classical music, at least if it's less than 100 years old. Modernism remains deeply traumatic. It gives me hope.

Early twentieth century harmony was characterised by (among other things) the whole-tone scale. Here I consider one idea, from Alexander Scriabin's Poem of Ecstacy, involving some chords that will be familiar to jazz musicians but in a somewhat different context, and of course expanding the idea to see where it takes us.

Here are two things I just figured out about the Earthquaker Interstellar Orbiter and Fairfield Circuitry's Randy's Revenge. I don't usually do gear posts here and maybe they're obvious to everyone else but I see some confusion about the former online and the latter took me a bit of effort to work out.

Here are some ideas based on my very imperfect understanding of Yusef Lateef's "triple diminished" approach to 12-tone improvisation. I'm not sure how he improvised with it in real time (though it seems from what I've read that he did) but the results certainly sound interesting and usable.

The common pentatonic scale has only two kinds of interval between its notes: each pair is separated by either a minor third (three frets) or a major second (two frets). Of course, this scale counds very familiar, not only because of its use in rock music but also from its very different uses in music by the likes of Debussy and Ravel. So it's interesting to look at what happens when we navigate the total chromatic using those two intervals.

Two big twentieth century studies of Carnatic scales by Western composers are now available in full on YouTube. If nothing else, I think we Western musicians can benefit from hearing these scales "in our own accent" rather than solely in the context of South Indian music. They also prove that these "exotic" scales can make excellent music in a Western style, in case that still needs to be proved to anyone.

Just a quick note on something funny I noticed in Richard Cohn's Audacious Euphony that led me to a mild (and daft) reharm of Giant Steps.