page_title: Octatonic scale
section_title: Early examples
hierarchical_section_title: Octatonic scale / History / Early examples
caption_attribution_description: English: Sarabande from J.S.Bach's English Suite No.3, bars 17-19
context_page_description: An octatonic scale is any eight-note musical scale. However, the term most often refers to the symmetric scale composed of alternating whole and half steps, as shown at right. In classical theory, this scale is commonly called the octatonic scale, although there are a total of 42 non-enharmonically equivalent, non-transpositionally equivalent eight-note sets.
  The earliest systematic treatment of the octatonic scale was in Edmond de Polignac's unpublished treatise "Etude sur les successions alternantes de tons et demi-tons" from c. 1879, which preceded Vito Frazzi's Scale alternate per pianoforte of 1930 by a full half-century.
context_section_description: Joseph Schillinger suggests that the scale was formulated already by Persian traditional music in the 7th century AD, where it was called "Zar ef Kend", meaning "string of pearls", the idea being that the two different sizes of intervals were like two different sizes of pearls (Schillinger 1946,)
  
  Octatonic scales first occurred in Western music as byproducts of a series of minor-third transpositions. While Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov claimed he was conscious of the octatonic collection "as a cohesive frame of reference" in his autobiography My Musical Life (Van den Toorn 1983, 329, 493n5), instances can be found in music of previous centuries. Eytan Agmon (1990, 1–8) locates one in Domenico Scarlatti's Sonata K. 319. In the following passage, according to Taruskin (1996, 266) "its descending whole-step/half-step bass progression is complete and continuous".
  Taruskin (1996, 269) also cites the following bars from J.S. Bach's English Suite No. 3 as octatonic:
  Honoré Langlé's 1797 harmony treatise contains a sequential progression with a descending octatonic bass, supporting harmonies that use all and only the notes of an octatonic scale (Langlé 1797, 72, ex. 25.2).
caption: Sarabande from J.S. Bach's English Suite No. 3, bars 17–19.
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