My E-Pub book: Composing Classical Music Using Octatonic Scales

I started writing in 8 note scales, i.e. Octatonic, as an excuse to get away from the diatonic scales music history.  A friend of mine told me he composed in the style of Handel because he liked that the most and was happy to ignore the next 300 years of development in harmony and increasing complexity.

I respect that decision.  Maybe for myself I did not want to turn out music that one could call a poor imitation of the style of any other composer. So I spent close to 3 years only composing using octatonic scales.

 I learned of course that some melodic ideas that popped into my head and that I wanted to work with did not fit into an octatonic scale and I had to play around with an idea until it did. I also realized that octatonic scales with their abundance of minor thirds were much more related to minor mode diatonic scales than to major mode diatonic scales.

 The idea of discovering how 9 note scales would influence my composing and how they would compare to 8 note scales (and the diatonic 7 note scales) did interest me of course as well. I also wanted to see if I could discover what and if there were any special aspects of these “symmetric” scales that I could use in order to create new special musical experiences.

 After spending that much time only composing using octatonic scales I felt that I had developed a “feeling” based on practice for these scales.  At the same time I could not yet declare that I had discovered what their “essence” was.  Needless to say that after listening for 70 years plus to diatonic scale music I was also not able to pinpoint what if any essence they contained.  However, I never before had spent any time pondering about it.

What I mean is that I would like to reach a stage where if I get a new melodic idea I could immediately know that this idea would best be developed and expressed using a specific scale, choosing between diatonic (7 note), octatonic (8 note) and nonatonic (9 note) scales.  What I am hoping for is that I would “see” that the “character” of the idea would be suited best if I had a scale with lots of minor thirds or a mix of minor and major thirds plus whatever else would push it to a 7 or 9 note scale.

I am ignoring for the moment the associated harmonies that would also have an impact on things.

The only way for me to get there, I think today, is to write a lot of music in all of these “genres” so that their “essence” can sink into my musical “bones”.

I decided to write a short book on octatonic scales which would show my current state of “exposure” to that scale.

It was an interesting experience for me.  I wanted to write a book where the reader could see a score but also select to hear the score at the same time.  It should however not turn into a website where I knew this could be done but remain a “book”, albeit a digital book.  Microsoft Word could not do it and after some trial and error I landed up writing it as an EPub format (with some help from a consultant, thank goodness, on the technical issues).

The book now resides at an Adobe website and can be found via the following link: