Neapolitan Major

The Neapolitan chord and the Neapolitan scale are not the same thing

Most people who type this name are looking for the Neapolitan chord, and that is a different object. The Neapolitan is a major triad built on the flattened second degree of an ordinary key — D♭ major inside C minor — usually placed in first inversion and called the Neapolitan sixth. It lives in keys that are otherwise unaltered.

The scale collects those notes into a mode of its own and makes the flat second permanent. A piece can use the Neapolitan chord for two beats and never leave C minor; a piece in Neapolitan major carries the flat second everywhere, including in its melody.

One note from the melodic minor

Melodic minor from C is C D E♭ F G A B. Dropping the second degree to D♭ produces the Neapolitan major and touches nothing else, so the minor third, the natural sixth and the leading tone all stay in place.

That single alteration is why the tonic chord is unchanged: C E♭ G B, a minor triad with a major seventh, exactly as in melodic minor. The flat second arrives as a ninth above it, and the resulting sound is a minor-major seventh with a flattened ninth.

Why the family has no augmented second

Reading the steps upward gives half, whole, whole, whole, whole, whole, half. No gap is wider than a whole tone anywhere in the scale, and because every mode is a rotation of the same steps, no mode of this family contains an augmented second either.

That is the sharpest line between the two Neapolitan families. Neapolitan minor gives every one of its seven modes exactly one augmented second and the exotic leap that comes with it; Neapolitan major has none, which makes it far smoother and much harder to recognise by ear.

Every mode is the whole tone scale plus one note

Removing the root from C D♭ E♭ F G A B leaves D♭ E♭ F G A B — six notes a whole step apart, which is one of the two whole tone scales. The Neapolitan major is therefore a whole tone scale with a single extra note wedged into it.

The same holds for all seven rotations, and the added note is different in each. That property explains the family's character better than any list of degrees: the modes drift the way whole tone material drifts, and the one foreign note is what gives each of them a tonic at all.

What else the name brings up

Naples has lent its name to a great deal besides harmony, and a search for the word rarely lands on music theory first. Neapolitan song is a repertoire of its own, the tarantella is a Neapolitan dance, and an autocomplete will happily offer majorette — the baton twirler — in place of major.

Within music the confusion worth avoiding is the neighbouring scale. Neapolitan minor is C D♭ E♭ F G A♭ B: identical except for a flat sixth, and that one degree carries both the augmented second and the darker colour the major version lacks.

Frequently asked questions