Whole-tone scale
"[4] Alexander Scriabin's mystic chord is a primary example, being a whole-tone scale with one note raised a semitone; this alteration allows for a greater variety of resources through transposition.
[5] In 1662, Johann Rudolf Ahle wrote a melody to the lyrics of Franz Joachim Burmeister's "Es ist genug" (It is enough), beginning it with four notes of the whole-tone scale on the four syllables.
[clarification needed] Johann Sebastian Bach chose the chorale to end his cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, BWV 60, set for four parts.
[6] In the 19th century, Russian composers went further with melodic and harmonic possibilities of the scale, often to depict the ominous; examples include the endings of the overtures to Glinka's opera Ruslan and Lyudmila and Borodin's Prince Igor, and the Commander's theme in Dargomyzhsky's The Stone Guest.
H. C. Colles names as the "childhood of the whole-tone scale" the music of Berlioz and Schubert in France and Austria and then Russians Glinka and Dargomyzhsky.
Though the whole-tone scale is prominent in much of his music after 1905 when he encountered Debussy, it serves simply to fit the motifs over augmented chords.
The first of Alban Berg's Seven Early Songs opens with a whole-tone passage both in the orchestral accompaniment and in the vocal line that enters a bar later.
[14] Ferruccio Busoni used the whole-tone scale in the right hand part of the "Preludietto, Fughetta ed Esercizio" of his An die Jugend, and Franz Liszt had used the technique as early as 1831, in the Grande Fantaisie sur La clochette.
[15] Some early instances of the use of the scale in jazz writing can be found in Bix Beiderbecke's "In a Mist" (1928) and Don Redman’s "Chant of the Weed" (1931).
In 1958, Gil Evans recorded an arrangement that gives striking coloration to the "abrupt whole-tone lines"[16] of Redman's original.
Wayne Shorter's composition "JuJu" (1965),[17] features heavy use of the whole-tone scale, and John Coltrane's "One Down, One Up" (1965), is built on two augmented chords arranged in the same simple structure as his earlier tune "Impressions".
A prominent example of the whole-tone scale that made its way into pop music are bars two and four of the opening of Stevie Wonder's 1972 song "You Are the Sunshine of My Life".
