Composition and Analysis With The Axis System
It may be noted that each of the above notes forms a descending diminished chord. In the case of I or C, C-A-F♯-D♯, or an E♭ fully diminished chord. This connects the axis system not only with diminished chords, which often form the basis for the movement in a piece based on the axis system, but also links the axis system with the diminished scales formed on ♭III of each of the principal tones: root, subdominant, and dominant.
The axis system is probably used more in analysis, and less in composition. Uses of the system have a characteristic sound, but that sound is similar to that which can be found in uses of tritone Dominant Substitutions, and Deceptive Cadences using the ♭VII dominant chord. Older systems of harmonic theory segue very easily into the axis system.
Read more about this topic: Axis System
Famous quotes containing the words composition, analysis, axis and/or system:
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“He is the essence that inquires.
He is the axis of the star;
He is the sparkle of the spar;
He is the heart of every creature;
He is the meaning of each feature;
And his mind is the sky,
Than all it holds more deep, more high.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox. Different points of view make sense, but only if there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)