How odd that I didn't have a label for "modes" until just now! I recall standing about ten feet away from Richard Taruskin many years ago at the annual American Musicological Society conference (it was in Baltimore that year) when he asked the Russian musicologist who was giving a talk on Tchaikovsky where one of the modes he had just mentioned could be found in the music. The Russian gave a moment's thought and said, "it is in volume two of the collected works, the choral piece such-and-such." Musicologists know all the details! In any case, I forget now exactly what mode that was, but it is certainly the case that Russians use a lot of weird modes not found elsewhere. Let's have a look at them, shall we?
I have mentioned the octatonic scale often enough here. It is a symmetrical scale that comes in two forms, a "minor" one and a "phrygian" one. Those are not the official names, I'm not sure they have official names. But one starts with a tone-semitone repeated, the "minor" form, while the other is reversed, starting with a semitone-tone repeated, hence "phrygian." I just call them that for my own convenience. Here they are:
I think the first time they were actually used in a musical composition was by Franz Liszt, but the scale really found a home with Russian composers, especially Rimsky-Korsakov and his students. In Russia it is known as the "Korsakov scale." Stravinsky used it a lot and so did Shostakovich. Russian musicologists have pointed out that Shostakovich used other modes as well and Russian musical history is particularly rich in weird modes. From the book Shostakovich Studies, p. 91, here are some other Russian modes:
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If the only Tchaikovsky you know is the Piano Concerto No. 1 played by Yuja Wang in an incredibly short skirt, then this piece by Tchaikovsky may surprise you: the Hymn of the Cherubim:
