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) can label the notes of the C major scale using A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, and so on. When we do so, we create a new scale called the A minor scale. See the musical note article for how the notes are customarily named in different countries. The scale degrees of a heptatonic (7-note) scale can also be named using the terms tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, subtonic. If the subtonic is a semitone away from the tonic, then it is usually called the leading-tone (or leading-note); otherwise the leading-tone refers to the raised subtonic.