Encyclopedia > Blues scale

  Article Content

Pentatonic scale

Redirected from Blues scale

In music, a pentatonic scale is a scale with five notes per octave. Pentatonic scales are found all over the world: in the tuning of the Ethiopian krar and the Indonesian gamelan, in the melodies of African-American spirituals and of composer Claude Debussy.

One of the most common pentatonic scales, sometimes called a major pentatonic scale, can be constructed in many ways. A simple construction takes five consecutive pitches from the circle of fifths: if starting on C, {C, G, D, A, E}. A more complicated construction, derived from Western European classical music, begins with a major scale and omits the fourth and the seventh scale degrees: a C major scale is {C, D, E, F, G, A, B}, so a C major pentatonic scale would be {C, D, E, G, A}.

The major pentatonic scale is the basic scale of the music of China and one of the most important scales in jazz. It is also very common in Scottish music[?]



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Reformed churches

... Reformed Church[?] The largest branch of the Reformed movement, and the only one of the national Reformed churches to survive without division since th ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 32.9 ms