Whole Tone Scale - Classical Music

Classical Music

Use of the melodic whole tone scale can be traced at least as far back as Mozart, in his Musical Joke, for strings and horns. In the 19th century Russian composers went further with melodic and harmonic possibilities of the scale, often to depict the ominous; consider the endings of the overtures to Glinka's opera Ruslan and Lyudmila and Borodin's Prince Igor, the Commander's theme in Dargomyzhsky's The Stone Guest, and the sea king's music in Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko. (For some short piano pieces written completely in whole-tone scale, see nos. 1, 6, and 7 from V.A. Rebikov's Празднество (Une fête), Op. 38, from 1907.)

H. C. Colles names as the "childhood of the whole-tone scale" the music of Berlioz and Schubert in France and then Russians Glinka and Dargomyzhsky. Claude Debussy, who had been influenced by Russians, along with other Impressionist composers made extensive use of whole tone scales. The whole tone scale was also used by Alban Berg in his Violin Concerto (the last four notes of the 12-tone row he used are B, C♯, E♭ and F, which, together with the first note, G, comprise 5 of the 6 notes of the scale) and by Béla Bartók in his Fifth String Quartet. Ferruccio Busoni used the whole tone scale in the right hand part of the "Preludietto, Fughetta ed Esercizio" of his An die Jugend, and Franz Liszt applied the whole tone scale to parts of the score of his Dante Symphony.