Near the beginning of the course, we familiarized ourselves with the common scales necessary for learning diatonic function: major, natural minor, melodic minor, harmonic minor, major pentatonic, minor pentatonic, and chromatic scales. If you need to refresh your memory of those scales, please review Unit 2.
Folk, pop, classical, and modern composers often organize pitch materials using scales other than major and minor. Some of these scales, like the various diatonic modes and the pentatonic collection, are relatively familiar to most listeners. Others — such as octatonic and whole-tone collections/scales — are more novel, and usually (but not always) found in twentieth- and twenty-first-century compositions.
When characterizing many of these new musical resources, the word “collection” is often more appropriate than “scale.” A collection is a group of notes — usually five or more. Imagine a collection as a source from which a composer can draw musical material — a kind of “soup” within which pitch-classes float freely. Collections by themselves do not imply a tonal center. But in a composition a composer may establish a tonal center by privileging one note of the collection, which we then call a scale.
Use the following arrangements of Happy Birthday to determine the intervallic pattern of each of these scales/collections. After discussing this with your group and writing the scale/collection out in standard ascending form, practice transposing the scale into various keys to ensure that you understand its structure. Finally, please read through the descriptions on the following page for background and the common usage for each of these scales/collections.