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
Scale (music) the scale, and the selection of chords taken naturally from the scale. A musical scale that contains tritones is called tritonic (though the expression is also used for any scale with just three notes per octave, whether or not it includes a tritone), and one without tritones is "atritonic". A scale or chord that contains semitones is called hemitonic, and without semitones is anhemitonic. Scales can be abstracted from performance or composition. They are also often used precompositionally to guide or limit a composition. Explicit instruction in scales has been part of compositional training for many centuries. One or more