Just as African masks influenced Picasso’s Demoiselles, non-European musics began to make inroads into European classical music. At a world’s fair that fascinated Paris in 1889 — the fair for which the Eiffel Tower was built — Debussy heard his first non-Western music played by native musicians, under simulated native conditions. He tried to recapture the sounds of the Indonesian gamelan (see page 198) in several compositions, even taking a Balinese melody for the theme of a concerto movement.

Debussy sensed a resonance between his own music and the shimmering timbres of the gamelan, and also the scales used in Indonesian music. The traditional diatonic scale had served as the foundation of Western music for so long that it was almost regarded as a fact of nature. But now composers were beginning to reconsider the basic sound materials of music. Notable among these experimenters was Charles Ives, in America. New scales were employed for themes or even whole movements, first among them the pentatonic scale, a five-note scale playable on the black notes of the piano, imported from folk song and Asian music. Debussy featured a pentatonic theme in Clouds, which we take up in Chapter 21.

Two other new scales introduced at this time are (significantly enough) artificial constructions, derived not from non-European music but by systematically manipulating the total chromatic scale. The whole-tone scale divides the octave into six equal parts. All of its intervals are whole steps, and it yields a dreamy, ambiguous sound that Debussy in particular prized. The octatonic scale — a specialty with Stravinsky — fits eight pitches into the octave by alternating whole and half steps.

More important as a means of composition than the use of any of these scales was serialism, the “new language” for music invented in the 1920s by Arnold Schoenberg. As we will see in the next chapter, serialism in effect creates something like a special scale for every serial composition.