Musical phrasing


Musical phrasing is the way a musician shapes a sequence of notes in a passage of music to allow expression, much like when speaking English a phrase may be written identically but may be spoken differently, and is named for the interpretation of small units of time known as phrases. A musician accomplishes this by interpreting the music—from memory or sheet music—by altering tone, tempo, dynamics, articulation, inflection, and other characteristics. Phrasing can emphasise a concept in the music or a message in the lyrics, or it can digress from the composer's intention, aspects of which are commonly indicated in musical notation called phrase marks or phrase markings. For example, accelerating the tempo or prolonging a note may add tension.
Giuseppe Cambini—a composer, violinist, and music teacher of the Classical period—had this to say about bowed string instruments, specifically violin, phrasing:

Intuitive and analytical phrasing

"There are two schools of thought on phrasing," says flutist Nancy Toff: "one more intuitive, the other more analytical. The intuitive school uses a verbal model, equating the function of phrasing with that of punctuation in language. Thus, said Chopin to a student, 'He who phrases incorrectly is like a man who does not understand the language he speaks.'"
Problems linked with an analytical approach to phrasing occur particularly when the analytical approach is based only on the search for objective information, or only concerned with the score:

Elision or reinterpretation

In the analysis of 18th- and 19th-century Western music, an elision, overlap, or rather reinterpretation, is the perception, after the fact, of a cadential chord at the end of one phrase as the initial chord of the next phrase. Two phrases may overlap, making the beginning and ending of both happen at the same moment in time, or both phrases and hypermeasures may overlap, making the last bar in the first hypermeasure and the first in the second. Charles Burkhart uses overlap and reinterpretation to distinguish between the overlap of phrases and of both phrase and measure-group, respectively.