Octatonic scale out, the cascading arpeggios played on the celesta in the "Sugar Plum Fairy" from "The Nutcracker" ballet are made up of dominant seventh chords a minor third apart. "Hagens Watch", one of the darkest and most sinister scenes in Richard Wagner's opera "Götterdämmerung" features chromatic harmonies using eleven of the twelve chromatic notes, within which the eight notes of the octatonic scale may be found in bars 9–10 below:] The scale also may be found in the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Melodic phrases that move by alternating tones and semitones frequently appear in the works of both
Transposition (music) Thus the set ("A") consisting of 0–1–2 transposed by 5 semitones is 5–6–7 (T("A")) since , , and . There are two different kinds of transposition, depending on whether one is measuring intervals according to the chromatic scale or some other scale. In chromatic transposition one shifts every pitch in a collection of notes by a fixed number of semitones. For instance, if one transposes the pitches C–E–G upwards by four semitones, one obtains the pitches E–G–B. In scalar transposition one shifts every pitch in a collection by a fixed number of scale steps relative to some scale. For example,