hey, welcome to 12tone.
there are lots of different reasons to make music.
sometimes, we're telling a story or expressing an emotional idea.
sometimes, we want to show off a cool structural design or push the boundaries of what we thought
was possible.
and sometimes, sometimes we do it as a dare.
this is the story of the Enigmatic scale.
(bang)
the Enigmatic scale was first published in the late 1800s in the Gazzetta musicale di
Milano, and it was the invention of the composer Adolfo Crescentini.
it was presented as a challenge, and I quote, "to those musicians who enjoy the study of
harmony".
it was crafted to be utterly incompatible with the relatively strict harmonic rules
of the day, and it defied composers to make music with it.
so what makes it so hard?
well, for starters, it's missing some pretty important notes, specifically the perfect
fourth (bang) and the perfect fifth.
(bang) these two play an essential role in defining tonality, and without them it becomes
difficult to actually establish a key.
you just don't have the harmonic grounding you need in order to really determine where
your root is.
now, missing the fourth or fifth isn't unheard of: scales like Lydian (bang) and Locrian
(bang) do it, and while the latter is also not easy to write music in, it's certainly
not impossible.
but that's just the beginning.
the next problem comes from the gaps between the notes.
look here: (bang) that's not a step.
it's too big, it's unnatural.
this bizarre leap gives the scale a weird, artificial quality.
it doesn't quite feel like a real scale.
again, this isn't a dealbreaker: you can find similar things in well-known scales like Harmonic
Minor (bang) but it is an added complication. and on the other end of the spectrum, we have
these four notes (bang) which are all way too close together, making it hard to identify
which of them is the root.
(bang)
and then we come to the harmony.
what chords can we make from it?
well, if we build from the root, we get this: (bang) which gives us another problem.
this is an augmented triad, and as we've discussed before, they're unstable.
they don't feel at rest, which means you can't get a strong sense of resolution from them.
(bang) they're just not good chords to base a scale off of.
and if we keep going, things get even weirder.
if we build off the Gb (bang) we get…
well, that's not actually a Gb chord at all.
if we rearrange the notes a bit, we get B major.
(bang) this means that our II chord, the chord built off the second note of the scale, isn't
even really a II chord, which is odd, to say the least.
the III chord is relatively simple (bang) although it's major, which is a bit weird,
but compared to everything else we've seen that's not that big a deal.
the IV chord, though… is.
(bang) that's not to say we can't describe this set of notes.
we have a name for every possible collection of pitches.
This one has the catchy moniker Forte number 3-8B, which tells us pretty much nothing about
what it's doing here.
and that's true for the rest of the scale: the V (bang) VI (bang) and VII chords (bang)
are all similarly incoherent.
and there's one last wrinkle: unlike most scales, the Enigmatic scale actually behaves
differently depending on whether it's going up or down.
so far, we've only been discussing its ascending form (bang) but, when we're descending, we
lower the fourth note, getting this.
(bang).
now at first, this seems like good news: it gives us the perfect fourth we were lacking,
and it turns the IV chord into something that makes some amount of sense.
(bang) but it comes at a cost: another one of those giant leaps.
(bang) this makes the whole thing feel even less structured, and with everything else
going wrong, it's hard to find this change all that helpful.
so with so many weird aspects, how do you even begin to approach this?
well, if you're following the original rules of the challenge, there is some good news:
you're not really stuck with just these notes.
you see, it wasn't meant to be a scale in the sense we usually think of.
instead, it was just a bassline, over which chords could be built, and you could use whatever
notes you wanted in those chords.
it still presents a lot of the same challenges, especially in a musical culture as obsessed
with voice-leading as the Romantics were, but at least you have some freedom.
probably the most famous answer to Crescentini's puzzle comes from Giuseppe Verdi, who incorporated
the scale into an arrangement of Ave Maria.
but Verdi took things a step further.
not only did he harmonize the bassline into a hauntingly beautiful piece of four-part
writing, he then restated the line in each of the other three voices, each time with
a different harmonic accompaniment.
so he didn't just solve the puzzle, he solved it four different ways.
it's also been used as a more normal scale, most notably in Joe Satriani's fittingly titled
song, The Enigmatic.
so what do you think?
are you up for the challenge?
either way, thanks for watching!
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