Octatonic Scale - History

History

Joseph Schillinger suggests that the scale was formulated already by Persian traditional music in the 7th century AD, where it was called "Zar ef Kend", meaning "string of pearls", the idea being that the two different sizes of intervals were like two different sizes of pearls (see Joseph Schillinger, The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, Vol 1).

Octatonic scales first occurred in Western music as byproducts of a series of minor-third transpositions. Agmon locates one in the music of Scarlatti, from the 1730s. Langlé's 1797 harmony treatise contains a sequential progression with a descending octatonic bass, supporting harmonies that use all and only the notes of an octatonic scale (p. 72, ex. 25.2).

The question of when Western composers first began to select octatonic scales as primary compositional material is difficult to determine. One strong candidate is a recurring theme in Franz Liszt's Feux Follets, the fifth of his first book of Études d'exécution transcendente (composed 1826, and twice revised). See descending arpeggiated figures of bars 7 and 8, 10 and 11, 43, 45 through 48, 122, and 124 through 126. In turn, all three distinct octatonic scales are used, respectively containing all, and only, the notes of each of these scales.

Liszt was to become an idol of the Russian school, and starting with Glinka's opera Ruslan and Lyudmila (first performed 1842) the diminished scale was often used by Russian composers to evoke scenes of magic and exotic mystery. Still, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov claimed the diminished scale as "his discovery" in his My Musical Life (van den Toorn 1983). He certainly used the scale extensively in his opera Kashchey the Immortal, which premiered in 1902. Following that, the scale was extensively used by his student Igor Stravinsky, particularly in his Russian period ballets Petrushka and The Rite of Spring dating from 1911 and 1913 respectively. Van den Toorn catalogues many octatonic moments in Stravinsky's music, although Tymoczko argues that many of them are byproducts of other syntactic concerns. The scale also may be found with some frequency in music of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Alexander Scriabin and Béla Bartók. In Bartók's Bagatelles, Improvisations, Fourth Quartet, Cantata Profana, and Improvisations, the octatonic is used with the diatonic, whole tone, and other "abstract pitch formations" (Antokoletz 1984) all "entwined...in a very complex mixture." Mikrokosmos 99, 101, and 109 are octatonic pieces, as is no. 33 of the Forty-Four Duos for two violins. "In each piece, changes of motive and phrase correspond to changes from one of the three octatonic scales to another, and one can easily select a single central and referential form of 8-28 in the context of each complete piece." However, even his larger pieces also feature "sections that are intelligible as 'octatonic music'" (Wilson 1992, p. 26–27).

Twentieth century composers who used octatonic collections include Samuel Barber, Béla Bartók, Ernest Bloch, Benjamin Britten, Julian Cochran, George Crumb, Claude Debussy, Irving Fine, Ross Lee Finney, Alberto Ginastera, John Harbison, Aram Khatchaturian, Witold Lutosławski, Olivier Messiaen, Darius Milhaud, Henri Dutilleux, Robert Morris, Jean Papineau-Couture, Krzysztof Penderecki, Francis Poulenc, Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel, Alexander Scriabin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, Toru Takemitsu, Joan Tower (Alegant 2010, 109), and Frank Zappa (Clement 2009, 214). Other composers include Jennifer Higdon. The Progressive Metal band Dream Theater also made use of the octatonic scale in their 2005 song "Octavarium".

In the 1920s Heinrich Schenker criticized the use of the octatonic scale, specifically Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, for the oblique relation between the diatonic scale and the harmonic and melodic surface (Pople 1991, 2).