CW15

I’ve played around with “shadow scales” (my own term) for years, but the real name is a “complement.” I love complements. A complement of a pitch collection is all the pitch classes that aren’t in it, everything it’s missing. It’s the negative image of a scale, the other half, and it can feel significant.

I’m always particularly eager to check out the complement of a hexatonic scale, because the complement is also hexatonic. The symmetry is a lure, the neatness. And the gospel scale’s complement, when I took a look, was striking. The shadow was… another gospel.