Phrase (music) - Musical Phrasing

Musical Phrasing

Phrasing refers to an expressive shaping of music, and relates to the shaping of notes in time. Phrasing relates to the manner of playing the individual notes of a particular group of consecutive notes; and the way they are weighted and shaped relative to one another. It does not refer to the idealised note values/durations as represented in sheet music; but to the multitude of deviations that the performer needs to make from sheet music, if a performance is to be expressive, in a particular style and culturally aware. An example may be an acceleration of a group of notes, but there are many more. This shaping of notes is creatively performed by the musician with the aim of expressing (feelings), and can be distinguished by the listener - not only factually, but in music, as emotional expression.

Being an expressive activity of creative musicians, this questions of how to shape a group of notes in time, cannot be (and is not) exactly specified. Giuseppe Cambini's wrote about violin playing:

The bow can express the affections of the soul: but besides there being no signs that indicate them, such signs, even were one to invent them, would become so numerous that the music, already too full of indications, would become a formless mass to the eyes, almost impossible to decipher. I should consider myself fortunate if I could only get a student to hear, through a small number of examples, the difference between bad and mediocre, mediocre and good, and good and excellent, in the diversity of expressions which one may give to the same passage. —"Nouvelle Méthode théorique et pratique pour le violon". Paris, Naderman (c. 1803). by Giuseppe Cambini

The shaping of notes in time, can generally be said to be such, that meaning ("affections of the soul") is expressed. In general particular musical thoughts appear in a group of notes following each other, forming a phrase: a particular part of a melody. These notes belong together and the melodic phrase is then shaped expressively: tension can be built up by accelerating; particular expressive pivot points or emphasis can shaped by holding notes longer (fermata); slowing down can be used to end phrases; rubato, etc.

Phrasing is sometimes also taken to include aspects of musical shaping, other than the timing of melodies, such as articulation and dynamics, etc.

It can also be influenced by lyrics on the song in relation to the piece of musical phrase in sheet music.