Scales and sonorities of the 20th Century.

by Armando L. Ramírez

Through a series of short articles, we will be covering some aspects and resources that have been frequently used by composers during the last years of the 19th Century and 20th Century. One of these resources has been the use of non-traditional scales, in other words, scales that are neither major or minor in their construction. Some of these are:

1. whole tone scale
2. pentatonic scale
3. 8-tones or diminished scale (also known as octatonic)
4. modes taken from the Medieval epoch

In addition to this, we could find some others types of scale, in some cases, scales created by the composers in order to get an unusual sound. In this article, we'll take a look at the formation and construction of the whole-tone scale and his possibilities as a compositional resource.