Whole-tone scale

A six-note scale whose successive pitches are each separated by a whole tone. Its equal spacing gives it no leading tone and makes its tonal center less definite than in major or minor scales.

Whole step: A musical interval spanning two semitones. Each adjacent pair of notes in the scale is separated by this interval.
Impressionism (music): A musical movement associated with coloristic harmony, flexible forms, and composers such as Claude Debussy. Debussy used the scale as one resource for evoking unstable, atmospheric tonal color.
Diatonic scale: A seven-note scale organized into five whole steps and two half steps per octave. Its unequal spacing creates stronger tonal hierarchy than the whole-tone scale.
Semitone: The smallest interval commonly used in Western equal-tempered music, equal to one twelfth of an octave. A whole tone consists of two semitones in the usual tuning system.
Alexander Scriabin: A Russian composer and pianist whose late works developed distinctive, nontraditional harmonic languages. His music helped establish whole-tone harmony as a resource in late Romantic and early modernist writing.
Equal temperament: A tuning system that divides the octave into equal intervals, commonly twelve semitones. In twelve-tone equal temperament, the scale’s six whole steps divide the octave evenly.
Claude Debussy: A French composer whose works helped shape musical modernism around the turn of the twentieth century. His piano prelude “Voiles” prominently explores whole-tone sonorities.
Chromatic scale: A scale containing all twelve pitch classes within an octave in the standard Western system. The whole-tone scale selects six of its twelve pitch classes at regular intervals.
Octave: The interval between two pitches where the higher pitch has twice the frequency of the lower. Six equal whole steps span the octave and repeat the scale’s pitch pattern.
Mikhail Glinka: A Russian composer whose operas helped establish a national tradition in Russian classical music. His opera Ruslan and Lyudmila includes an early famous use of whole-tone writing.

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