demonofthenight

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PHRASING

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I’m going to introduce phrasing as early as possible, due to the fact it’s by far the simplest and most useful topic I’ll cover.

What is phrasing? A musical phrase is the same as a written phrase. Think of a musical melody as a written phrase. Look at a few of my sentences; they use punctuations (pauses) and full stopes, making it easier to read. A musical phrase is the same thing.

Phrasing, even in its literal definition, has many different and arguable meanings. For instance some people on UG believe phrasing is about pick attack and minute (but important) rhythmic differences in the way one can play the same melody.

In this article, good phrasing means meticulously structured melodies and intelligent repetition that avoids sounding obnoxious.

A paragraph is called a motif. A sentence is called a phrase and the bits separated apostrophes and sentence extenders (and, because, therefore, furthermore) are units. An essay is a song.

Check out the example below. Notice the wavy lines, these are called phrase markings. When analysing music, you should put phrase markings in.

Sometimes phrases won’t have units so don’t worry if you think you can’t discern units. If a phrase is partitioned into units, you will clearly see two parts to the same phrase, but it won’t look or sound separate enough to call it two phrases.

You can usually tell the phrase and unit ends by singing it. The phrase ends are where you take a quick breath to continue humming or singing it. Use this technique with caution, as it’s much more efficient to be able to take a quick look at a melody to analyse it.

you cannot have a big block of notes in you music that have no direction or punctuations seem to flow endlessly without a break just seem thrown together without any sense of thought or creativity because a machine can pull random notes out of its arse and throw them over a progression which would not have any flow and the listener will get annoyed stop listenening it wont be very good just like this paragraph which you should have stopped reading but you havent because your obviously either a very bored person or you have an awesome attention span i think you should divert your attention to the rest of what i've written is a big block of word like a wall of text that most people too long didnt read.

That previous paragraph is an example of what not to do, musically.

When writing a melody, don’t write it like an improvised solo (but you can write an improvised solo like a melody). Try to keep referring to a (musical) main idea. Repetition is probably the best way to do this and I will go into further detail later.

For the moment, there are some guidelines I would suggest beginner writers to stick to.

1. Structure your phrases only x amount of notes. Keep them regular. No 3 note phrases and than 10 note phrases unless you know what you’re doing, it will sound disjointed.

2. Stick to 3/4 timing. It’s the easiest way and I'll go into why later.

3. When transcribing your noodlings, bar them so each phrase is about 1 or 2 bars in length (not 1 and a half or 2 and 3/4!). This is something you'll notice in most melodies, although most composers will bend and break this rule.

These above rules are mostly to keep your melodies neat. At first they might seem strict but they’re not. All you need to do to abide by these rules is remove or add a few notes by embellishment or change the rhythmic value of some notes.

Don’t be afraid to leave a bar mostly (or completely) blank. This should be done to keep the melody neat.

Don’t worry if you're noodlings are only 2 or 4 bars to start with, in the end you can beef these 2 phrases out to 32 bars.

Repetition is probably the easiest way of beefing out melodies. To do this, label each phrase as A, B, C or D and apply some pattern.

The most popular patterns are:

AABA

AABC

ABAB

ABC

AAB

ABA

These patterns have been copied heaps by jazz and classical composers. Check out Mark Levine’s Jazz Theory Book for some examples of what songs use these forms.

You can use modulation to further the expansion of your melodies. It’s best to repeat the melody in modulation to the relative and the parallel minors or to nearly related keys (follow your CoF’s).

See the form used in My Favourite Things is A, Ad, A, Ad, B, Bd, C

What I mean by “Ad” and “Bd” is a developing phrase

A form of repetition in music is also called development (see the example Dance of Death). Each development should have some sort of variance. By doing this we are forcing our songs to be catchy, yet keeping them from being obnoxious.

Remember to keep the amount of unity level with the amount of variance (use your ear). What I mean by unity is how much each phrase is alike to the previous phrase (whether it’s a developing phrase or not). Even B phrases should have some similarities to A phrases.

The most common form of development is to repeat the most important sounding bits of a phrase. You know those bits that sort of become well known in the song? Those are the bits composers like to repeat. London Bridge (below) and “Polly put the kettle on” are really obvious examples of this.

Most development revolves around this sort of repetition. Offcourse, other techniques are usually combined with this.

Most developments and repetitions actually use embellishments. Thus the reason for me introducing embellishments so early.

You could also develop by starting on a different degree. This means although you are keeping within the scale (try to keep your beginning melodies diatonic); you now start on a different note, but keep all melodic intervals diatonically the same as before.

Notice the repetition in the second phrase of London Bridge.

It’s also a smart idea to develop by changing a few key notes in the development, usually the size of a disjunct interval. This is especially effective if it’s the first disjunct intervals that you are changing.

Notice the double note embellishments, the passing tones and how the first phrase resolves on a G#, yet the next phrase resolves on a C#.

Although rare, another form of development is to develop by inversion. It