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) Due to the principle of octave equivalence, scales are generally considered to span a single octave, with higher or lower octaves simply repeating the pattern. A musical scale represents a division of the octave space into a certain number of scale steps, a scale step being the recognizable distance (or interval) between two successive notes of the scale. However, there is no need for scale steps to be equal within any scale and, particularly as demonstrated by microtonal music, there is no limit to how many notes can be injected within any given musical interval. A measure of the width