The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis
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The harmonic and melodic minor scales do not appear in eighteenth-century writings about music (although variants of scale-degrees ^6 and ^7 do appear). If you mentioned them to Mozart and Beethoven, they would have had no knowledge of these "scales." The three types of minor were devised later, as a teaching tool to show possible variants of scale-degrees ^6 and ^7 in minor keys, and to help students learn how to choose the correct version of those scale degrees in composition, depending on the harmonic or melodic context. We use them for that purpose as well.