Round Three

NUMEROUS COMPOSERS HAVE EXPLORED THE MODES OF the acoustic scale (or ascending melodic minor), including Adams, BartOk, Debussy, de Falla, Faure, Glass, Janacek, Liszt, Prokofiev, Ravel, Reich, Rzewski, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Szymanowski, Shostakovich, and virtually every contemporary jazz musician. The scale is clearly one of the central collections of twentieth-century tonality—and possibly even more prevalent than the octatonic. Though much discussed by jazz pedagogues, academic theorists have paid it scant attention; there are relatively few articles discussing it, and scholars have consistently misinterpreted musical passages in which it appears. Arnold Whittall, for example, describes the acoustic scale in Debussy's "Des pas sur la neige" (mm. 16-18) as a combination of diatonic and whole-tone elements, while Pieter van den Toorn describes the acoustic scale at the end of Stravinsky's "Dance of the Adolescents" (R32) as a combination of octatonic and diatonic elements. 1 As a graduate student, I was surprised to learn that academics could be so blind to one of the most important scales of the twentieth century. (Indeed, I still remember a composition teacher pointing to one of my acoustic-scale melodies and proudly declaring, "Aha! The whole-tone scale!") How, I wondered, had we reached the point where jazz textbooks, intended to help practical musicians develop their improvisational skills, provided a more reliable guide to basic concepts of twentiethcentury art music than university press monographs? And what did it say about the methodology of music theory that respected figures such as Whittall and van den Toorn could go so drastically wrong about such obvious cases, or that eminent historians (such as Taruskin) could fail to notice when they do? Such questions suggest that we often perceive what we expect to perceive, and that the growth of understanding can be surprisingly slow. (Van den Toorn's book was published in 1983, with my critique appearing almost twenty years later; Taruskin's response now comes almost ten years after that.) And they show that music-theoretical disputes are sometimes motivated not by subtle issues of methodology, but by basic issues of musical literacy. After all, most of us were children when we first encountered the melodic minor scale, and virtually everyone agrees that modality is central to twentieth-century composition. So how