Encyclopedia > Pentatonic scale

  Article Content

Pentatonic 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
Brazil

... 7 Culture 8 Miscellaneous topics 9 External Links History Main article: History of Brazil Brazil was first sighted by Europeans in 1500 an ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 25.6 ms