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Compiling global examples of music in the Whole-Tone Scale

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1-2-3-#4-b6-b7

(C-D-E-F^#-A^b-B^b-C)

o • o • o • o • o • o • o

• Whole-Tone: Sounds •

Real-world examples of the scale in action:

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• General: While the scale is rarely used as the tone-set for an entire piece, it does form a prominent part of works by Wayne Shorter (Juju: intro), Stevie Wonder (You Are the Sunshine of My Life: intro), King Crimson (Fracture: guitar solo), 

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• Classical: Closely associated with Claude Debussy, who used it on pieces including Voiles (inspired by watching the performances of American scarf dancer Loïe Fuller). Other composers have explored it too: e.g. in Charles Ives’ mini-song The Cage, used to give shape to some curious lyrics (“A leopard went around his cage, from one side back to the other side; he stopped only when the keeper came around with meat; A boy who had been there three hours began to wonder, ‘Is life anything like that?’…“). Also hear an ingenious etude by melodic theorist Nicolas Slonimsky entitled Bach x 2 = Debussy, where he ‘doubles’ all the intervals of J.S. Bach’s Cm keyboard fugue (i.e. each semitone becomes a tone, each tone becomes 4 semitones, etc), thus locking the resulting piece to the whole-tone scale.

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• Soundtrack: Most easily recognised as the ‘dream sequence motif’ of countless film and TV soundtracks, where its unresolving character provides an ideal signifier for the heady transition between waking and sleeping. Also used fleetingly on countless other soundtracks (e.g. the rapid descending runs which pepper Danny Elfman’s Simpsons Theme).

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• India: Turns up as the seldom-heard Hindustani Raag Sehera, described as “the forbidden scale” by sarangi virtuoso Sultan Khan (who, after pre-recording it for All India Radio, reportedly requested that his session “should not be aired, [as] it is too sad”) – as well as even rarer forms such as Dhyan Kalyan and Trishanku (which, as explained to me by its creator Ashish Dha, has two distinctly-tuned incarnations: ‘Trishanku #1‘ has ‘#4-b6-b7‘ frequency ratios of ‘10:7; 100:63; 25:14‘, whereas ‘Trishanku #2‘ has ‘25:18; 25:16; 225:128‘: equating to cent values of ‘617-800-1003‘ & ‘569-773-977‘]). Also traceable in South India as the barely-recorded Ragam Gopriya.

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—Ghazal in Raag Sehera (North India)—

Mehdi Hassan & Sultan Khan (vocal/sarangi)

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Q

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• Whole-Tone: More •

Features, classifiers, quirks, etc…

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[analysis: coming soon]

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—Classifiers & Quirks—

• Modes: Like all ‘regular’ scales, the Whole-Tone sequence is ‘optimally rotationally symmetric‘ (i.e. all of its modes are identical to the scale itself)
• Quirks: Anhemitonic; Centred; Fragmented; Maximal; Palindromic; Self-shadowing; Reflectional sym.; Rotational sym. (imperfect: root, ♮2, ♮3, #4, b6, b7; detached: root, ♮2, ♮3, #4, b6, b7)
• Names: Whole-Tone, Anhemitonic Hexatonic, Messiaen Mode 1 (Western); Sehera (Hindustani); Gopriya (Carnatic)

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n.b. For more detailed geometric and mathematical analysis, refer to this scale’s entry in Ian Ring’s fantastic Exciting Universe of Music Theory project (for which I am an occasional ‘raga consultant’)

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