Exotic Scales

The major scale is constructed as a stack of perfect fifths, so it contains the maximum number of them of any seven-note scale: six, in fact, because of that pesky diminished fifth between the 5 and 7 of the scale. I wondered which other scales (in 12EDO) contain lots of fifths.

In this final installment we look at some chords and harmonic ideas from the Moonlight and Bridge chords, focusing on the most exotic sounds we found last time.

In the previous post I introduced what I'm calling the Bridge Chord and the Moonlight Chord. In the process I made lists of their hypermodes as if it was obvious why I was doing that; in this post we'll peer a bit deeper into the waters we've disturbed and see what we can make out.

I recently went through an exercise of writing a lot of tunes using Suvarnangi or, more accurately, a mode of Suvarnangi. This scale seems very lumpy and dissonant when you just run it up and down so here I'll break down how I think of it and some of the secrets it contains. Because as with any seven-note scale, what seems like nothing much turns out to contain a whole universe when we stick it under the microscope.

Forte's set number 6-z6 can be played as C-C#-D-F-F#-G, which doesn't look like much. I found it today while trying to capture a bit of Sorabji's style and got some nice vocabulary ideas from it on the theme of intervals moving in contrary motion.

This post is a bit of a continuation of the previous one on "expanded Harmonic Minor". The idea is again to take a somewhat familiar idea of playing something a semitone above or below the root of a chord, and flip it to be below or above, as it were. These ideas came out of playing through the chords to "Blue in Green", which isn't to say they're particularly applicable to that tune but more that they came from a real musical context, not some abstract theoretical observation.

We can think of the Harmonic Minor scale as a minor triad with a diminished seventh chord a semitone below it. In fact, I'd guess this is how the scale originally came about, and you can hear this relationship frequently in the music of Bach's time. This post is about an expanded version of that idea.

Following up on this recent post that used the minor major 7 (mM7) chord, here's a quick description of what happens when you combine a pair of them. It turns out there are only three different ways to do this.

The Half-Whole (or Whole-Half) Diminished scale has eight notes. What happens if we delete one? It turns out there are only two ways to do this, but each produces a seven-note scale with a full complement of modes.

The Carnatic melakatas form a system of 72 seven-note scales. What happens if we play them upside down?