The enigmatic scale (Italian : scala enigmatica) is an unusual musical scale, with elements of both major and minor scales, as well as the whole-tone scale. It was originally published in a Milan journal as a musical challenge, with an invitation to harmonize it in some way.
The enigmatic scale was invented by a professor of music at the Bologna Conservatory, Adolfo Crescentini. [4] On August 5, 1888, Ricordi’s Gazzetta musicale di Milano challenged its readers to compose a piece that harmonized against this scale. The Gazzetta published several solutions to this “scala-rebus” (scale-puzzle), including one by Crescentini, yet the whole affair might have become obscure had not Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi later composed his own solution, which became the basis of the "Ave Maria (sulla scala enigmatica)" (1889, revised 1898), part of the Quattro Pezzi Sacri (1898) [4 sacred pieces]. [5] It has been described as "that still almost incomprehensible into-one-another-gliding of harmonies over the entirely 'unnatural' scala enigmatica". [6] The piece features the scale both in its harmonies and as a cantus firmus throughout the short piece [7] in whole-note values in the bass and then each successively higher voice accompanying, "queer counterpoint which...is far-fetched and difficult of intonation; [and] the total effect is almost, if not quite, as musical as it is curious". [3]
The version of the scale starting on C is as follows:
The scale has a general formula of:
With the musical steps as following: Semitone, Tone and a half, Tone, Tone, Tone, Semitone, Semitone.
The scale lacks a perfect fourth and a perfect fifth above the starting note. Both the fourth and fifth degrees of a scale form the basis of standard chord progressions, which help establish the tonic.
The scale was used by guitarist Joe Satriani in his piece "The Enigmatic" [1] from Not of This Earth (1986), Monte Pittman with the song "Missing" on "The Power Of Three", and by pianist Juan María Solare in his piano miniature "Ave Verdi" (2013). It was also used in the song "Enigma" from the 1989 album The Spin by the Yellowjackets composed by Russell Ferrante and Jimmy Haslip .
The major scale is one of the most commonly used musical scales, especially in Western music. It is one of the diatonic scales. Like many musical scales, it is made up of seven notes: the eighth duplicates the first at double its frequency so that it is called a higher octave of the same note.
In western classical music theory, the minor scale refers to three scale patterns – the natural minor scale, the harmonic minor scale, and the melodic minor scale.
In music theory, an interval is a difference in pitch between two sounds. An interval may be described as horizontal, linear, or melodic if it refers to successively sounding tones, such as two adjacent pitches in a melody, and vertical or harmonic if it pertains to simultaneously sounding tones, such as in a chord.
The chromatic scale is a set of twelve pitches used in tonal music, with notes separated by the interval of a semitone. Chromatic instruments, such as the piano, are made to produce the chromatic scale, while other instruments capable of continuously variable pitch, such as the trombone and violin, can also produce microtones, or notes between those available on a piano.
In music theory, the tritone is defined as a musical interval spanning three adjacent whole tones. For instance, the interval from F up to the B above it is a tritone as it can be decomposed into the three adjacent whole tones F–G, G–A, and A–B.
In music theory, the key of a piece is the group of pitches, or scale, that forms the basis of a musical composition in Western classical music, art music, and pop music.
Tonality or key: Music which uses the notes of a particular scale is said to be "in the key of" that scale or in the tonality of that scale.
An octatonic scale is any eight-note musical scale. However, the term most often refers to the ancohemitonic symmetric scale composed of alternating whole and half steps, as shown at right. In classical theory, this symmetrical scale is commonly called the octatonic scale, although there are a total of 43 enharmonically inequivalent, transpositionally inequivalent eight-note sets.
In jazz, the altered scale, altered dominant scale, or Super Locrian scale is a seven-note scale that is a dominant scale where all non-essential tones have been altered. This means that it comprises the three irreducibly essential tones that define a dominant seventh chord, which are root, major third, and minor seventh and that all other chord tones have been altered. These are:
A jazz scale is any musical scale used in jazz. Many "jazz scales" are common scales drawn from Western European classical music, including the diatonic, whole-tone, octatonic, and the modes of the ascending melodic minor. All of these scales were commonly used by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky, often in ways that directly anticipate jazz practice. Some jazz scales, such as the eight-note bebop scales, add additional chromatic passing tones to the familiar seven-note diatonic scales.
In music theory, the circle of fifths is a way of organizing pitches as a sequence of perfect fifths. Starting on a C, and using the standard system of tuning for Western music, the sequence is: C, G, D, A, E, B, F♯/G♭, C♯/D♭, G♯/A♭, D♯/E♭, A♯/B♭, F, and C. This order places the most closely related key signatures adjacent to one another.
A semitone, also called a minor second, half step, or a half tone, is the smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music, and it is considered the most dissonant when sounded harmonically. It is defined as the interval between two adjacent notes in a 12-tone scale, visually seen on a keyboard as the distance between two keys that are adjacent to each other. For example, C is adjacent to C♯; the interval between them is a semitone.
In music, a triad is a set of three notes that can be stacked vertically in thirds. Triads are the most common chords in Western music.
Modes of limited transposition are musical modes or scales that fulfill specific criteria relating to their symmetry and the repetition of their interval groups. These scales may be transposed to all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, but at least two of these transpositions must result in the same pitch classes, thus their transpositions are "limited". They were compiled by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, and published in his book La technique de mon langage musical.
A heptatonic scale is a musical scale that has seven pitches, or tones, per octave. Examples include:
In Western music and music theory, augmentation is the lengthening of a note or the widening of an interval.
Jazz chords are chords, chord voicings and chord symbols that jazz musicians commonly use in composition, improvisation, and harmony. In jazz chords and theory, most triads that appear in lead sheets or fake books can have sevenths added to them, using the performer's discretion and ear. For example, if a tune is in the key of C, if there is a G chord, the chord-playing performer usually voices this chord as G7. While the notes of a G7 chord are G–B–D–F, jazz often omits the fifth of the chord—and even the root if playing in a group. However, not all jazz pianists leave out the root when they play voicings: Bud Powell, one of the best-known of the bebop pianists, and Horace Silver, whose quintet included many of jazz's biggest names from the 1950s to the 1970s, included the root note in their voicings.
Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are used to characterize scales. The terms are also applied to musical instruments, intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony. They are very often used as a pair, especially when applied to contrasting features of the common practice music of the period 1600–1900.
The Quattro pezzi sacri are choral works by Giuseppe Verdi. Written separately during the last decades of the composer's life and with different origins and purposes, they were nevertheless published together in 1898 by Casa Ricordi. They are often performed as a cycle, not in chronological sequence of their composition, but in the sequence used in the Ricordi publication:
In music, harmonization is the chordal accompaniment to a line or melody: "Using chords and melodies together, making harmony by stacking scale tones as triads".
Musicology commonly classifies scales as either hemitonic or anhemitonic. Hemitonic scales contain one or more semitones, while anhemitonic scales do not contain semitones. For example, in traditional Japanese music, the anhemitonic yo scale is contrasted with the hemitonic in scale. The simplest and most commonly used scale in the world is the atritonic anhemitonic "major" pentatonic scale. The whole tone scale is also anhemitonic.
