Phrasing
In this lesson, you'll learn to divide a melody into figures, phrase members and phrases, and to play it with its punctuation, the way you would read a sentence aloud.
Welcome to Part Five. The first four parts gave you all the signs of notation and the rules that govern them, for pitch as well as for duration. These signs are enough to read music, but they are not enough to bring it to life. A performance that is accurate but neutral stays dull and cold. As the performer, you have to animate it and give it color, following the composer's thought.
Danhauser divides this expression into four elements, and each one gets its own lesson: phrasing, accentuation, which we now usually call articulation, dynamics and character. Let's start with phrasing.
What is phrasing?
Phrasing is the exact observance of musical punctuation. A piece divides up like a speech: it has its sentences, its clauses and its pauses for breath. When you phrase, you make that division audible.
The units of a musical phrase
- The melodic figure is a small melodic idea, often one or two measures long. It is the smallest unit that makes sense on its own.
- The phrase member is made of one or more melodic figures joined together. Its meaning is only partial, like a clause followed by a comma.
- The phrase, which Danhauser also calls the period, brings several phrase members together into a complete whole, a finished thought, like a sentence that ends with a period. Be aware that in English-language analysis, the word “period” usually has a narrower meaning: two phrases that answer each other.
| Music | Language | Equivalent punctuation |
|---|---|---|
| Melodic figure | Word, group of words | none, or a slight inflection |
| Phrase member | Clause | comma, semicolon, colon |
| Phrase (period) | Complete sentence | period, or full stop in British English |
An example to listen to
Here is the theme of Beethoven's “Ode to Joy”, from the finale of his Ninth Symphony. Listen to how it forms an eight-measure phrase in two members of four measures, each made of two figures of two measures.
Did you notice that both members begin the same way? Only the ending changes. The first time, the melody is left hanging on the 2nd degree, over dominant harmony; the second time, it comes to rest on the tonic. That is exactly the effect of a comma followed by a period.
How to find the punctuation
Phrases, and even phrase members, are often separated by short rests, and then they are easy to spot. When no rest separates them, you have to analyze carefully, because no musical sign on its own marks the beginning or the end of a phrase.
Your surest clue is the cadence, the progression of chords that closes a member or a phrase. Danhauser points this out in a footnote: you can recognize punctuation easily from the cadences, but that requires some knowledge of harmony, which is useful not only to the composer but to the performer as well.
Phrasing well
To phrase well, to punctuate a piece well, is to convey with artistry the beginning, the development and the end of phrases and phrase members. In practice, you take momentum at the start, you lead the line toward its high point, you relax the ending instead of cutting it off, and you breathe between members.
Danhauser makes this the first quality of expression. Good phrasing sheds light on every part of a composition. And to interest and move your listener, you must be understood; to be understood, you must be clear.
Here is “Au clair de la lune”, a French folk song. Find the phrase members, and for each one, say which note it stops on and which punctuation mark it corresponds to.
In the “Ode to Joy” theme above, how many melodic figures are there? And where would you breathe?