Double Harmonic Major

Two augmented seconds, and why they define it

Most scales contain steps of a half or a whole tone. This one has two gaps of three half steps, placed symmetrically around the fifth. That symmetry is audible: the top half of the scale answers the bottom half, and the ear recognises the shape long before it can name the notes.

Those two intervals are the entire identity of the scale. Remove either one and it collapses into something ordinary — take out the first and it becomes harmonic major, take out the second and it becomes Phrygian dominant.

The many names of one scale

Byzantine is the name it carries most often in English, and it is the one people search for. In Arabic practice the same intervals are Hijaz Kar; in Indian classical music the closest equivalent is the Mayamalavagowla thaat, the scale beginners are taught first in the Carnatic tradition. Western theory calls it double harmonic major, and gypsy major is used too.

The names come from different traditions describing the same seven notes, and none of them owns it. Worth knowing when reading a lesson: an Arabic maqam text and a jazz book can be teaching the identical scale under names that share no words.

Building it from any root

Count: half, augmented second, half, whole, half, augmented second, half. In C the notes are C D♭ E F G A♭ B; in E — a common guitar key for it — E F G♯ A B C D♯; in D, D E♭ F♯ G A B♭ C♯.

The pattern is symmetrical, so it is unusually easy to memorise: the second half repeats the shape of the first a fifth higher. Guitarists usually learn it in one position and move it, because the fingering does not change with the key the way a diatonic shape does.

The chords underneath

The tonic triad is major and the scale sits on it without argument, but the harmony around it behaves unusually: the second degree gives a major chord a half step above the tonic, and that pair — I and ♭II — is the sound most people associate with the scale before any melody is played.

In practice it is used over a static tonic rather than through a progression. Give it a drone or a pedal and it speaks; run it over changing harmony and the two augmented seconds fight whatever is underneath.

Where it is heard

Film scoring reaches for it whenever a scene needs to signal the eastern Mediterranean or the Middle East, and it is used so consistently for that purpose that the association has become a cliché worth using knowingly. It is also genuine practice, not just a signifier: Greek rebetiko, Turkish and Arabic classical music all use these intervals as a home scale.

In rock and metal it arrives through surf guitar and through bands who took the interval from Middle Eastern recordings — Dick Dale played it because he grew up with it, and much of what followed came from him rather than from the source.

What it is confused with

Harmonic major is the closest neighbour and the commonest mix-up, helped by the near-identical names. It has a natural second, one augmented second instead of two, and none of this scale's symmetry. Phrygian dominant is the other: 1 b2 3 4 5 b6 b7, the same lower half but a flat seventh on top.

The Hungarian minor is the fourth mode of this scale — the same seven notes started from a different degree — which is why the two sound related without being the same. A comparison from the same root makes the difference immediate.

Frequently asked questions