The whole tone scale

Like diminished chords, the whole tone scale is not very widely used, but when you need that specific vibe, nothing else will do. Whole tone scales are easy to understand, because there are only two of them total. Whichever key you are in, there is a whole tone scale that includes the tonic, and another one that doesn’t. I have never seen a useful naming system for these two scales, so I call them yin and yang.

Notice that the notes not found in yin are all the notes in yang, and vice versa. Another fun thing is that when you write the whole tone scales on the circle of fifths, they look exactly the same as they do on the chromatic circle – all the yang scale tones just switch places with their counterparts a tritone away. Symmetry!

The whole tone scale is a film score cliche for dreaminess, surrealism, and general weirdness. The paradigmatic example for Generation X is the Simpsons theme song. There’s a whole tone run in between each statement of the main theme–the first one is about thirty seconds in.

There is another iconic whole tone scale in Stevie Wonder’s ballad “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life” – it’s the rising riff in measures three and four of the intro.

The classical composer most closely associated with the whole tone scale is Claude Debussy. “Voiles” is almost all whole tone.

Alexander Scriabin does a lovely blend of whole tone and diatonic harmony in his prelude Op. 31, No. 4.

Moving back into my own preferred musical genres, Curtis Fuller’s arrangement of “Three Blind Mice” for the Jazz Messengers takes advantage of the fact that the first three notes in the major scale happen to be part of the whole tone collection. Fuller’s version harmonizes these three notes a major third below for maximum whole tone weirdness. The rhythm is amazingly hip too.

I encounter whole tone scales most often in the music of Thelonious Monk. He uses them in several of his compositions, and in a large percentage of his improvised solos. For example, check out the third and fourth measures of “Four In One” (see a chart here.)

Monk is running straight up the C (yin) whole tone scale over a C7 chord, creating a C9(b5 #5) sound. He does it in groups of six sixteenth notes that move in and out of sync with the underlying hypermeter, it’s extremely cool.

Here’s a more complex example:

In this tune, Monk is taking advantage of a specific affordance of the whole tone scale, which is its relationship to dominant seventh chords. Each whole tone scale contains six dominant seventh chords, or more specifically, ninth chords with flat and sharp fifths.

• The pitches in the yin scale can be combined to make C9, D9, E9, Gb9, Ab9, and Bb9.
• The pitches in the yang scale can be combined to make Db9, Eb9, F9,  G9, A9, and B9.

The practical consequence of this fact is that you can imply key movement around the circle of fifths just by alternating the yin and yang scales. A standard Monkian use case is the bridge of rhythm changes.

• On D7: Play the yin scale to imply D9(b5 #5)
• On G7: Play the yang scale to imply G9(b5 #5)
• On C7: Play the yin scale to imply C9(b5 #5)
• On F7: Play the yang scale to imply F9(b5 #5)

You could keep alternating the scales to keep going all the way around the circle of fifths if you wanted. However, this idea is easy to misuse. If you just mindlessly alternate a whole tone riff up and down chromatically, listeners will get bored. So why does Monk sound so cool when he does it? It’s all in the groove. Listen to Monk improvise with whole tone scales on a circle of fifths progression and you will never hear him just playing predictable patterns. His rhythms are full of unexpected hesitance, rushing, and displacement. When he does do a long run up or down the scale, he intentionally stumbles and staggers through the time. You can tell it’s intentional, because he always lands with the note he intends on the beat he intends.

And by the way, Monk is not just rhythmically surprising; he bucks the harmonic patterns too. He ends the bridge of “Rhythm-a-Ning” by playing the wrong whole tone scale for the underlying chord! It is tense. Listen at 1:05.

Here’s a track that combines “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life”, “Four In One”, “Three Blind Mice” and “Mary Had A Little Lamb.”

Here’s a chart of its various components:

Any time you are writing a whole tone scale in notation, you are going to run into a lot of awkwardness around accidentals. There is no way to write them consistently or logically; at some point you are going to need to cross from flats to sharps via a diminished third. The scale is a creature of twelve-tone equal temperament that exists outside the harmonics-based major key system. It makes more sense on a scale necklace than on the staff.