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  • Before we leave meter and move onto phrases,

  • let's look at something that bridges the two...

  • anacrusis.

  • This is both a poetic and a musical term, and in music, it indicates that the

  • start of a piece or section begins with

  • an under-full bar, most characteristically just the last beat.

  • This is often called a pickup note.

  • Some very well-known melodies are structured

  • in this way, for instance, Happy Birthday

  • to You or the main theme of the final movement of Brahms's Fourth Symphony.

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  • So when we have music with anacrusis, we tend to start each of the

  • phrases in the music with the pickup note, as in the examples just noted.

  • But what are phrases?

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  • A phrase is a part of a melody, a group of several bars, most often four.

  • It forms a melodic unit that feels more or

  • less complete, depending upon its harmonic context at the end.

  • In fact, phrases are generally articulated by harmony in western music, and

  • in particular by what we call cadences; we'll cover these in week five.

  • Not coincidentally, a phrase is often the approximate

  • length of a singer's or a wind player's breath.

  • So there might be rests at the end of a phrase, in which they can take a breath.

  • Phrases might be indicated in notation by a curved line above the stave, much as

  • a wind player's slur line indicates a

  • passage to be performed in one breath also.

  • Phrase marks and slur lines are not equivalent, but

  • they are related and look pretty much the same.

  • So what we can see now is a clear hierarchy

  • of musical structure from rhythms grouped into beats, beats into bars,

  • bars now into phrases and as you'll see next, phrases

  • into periods, or phrase groups if they're not grouped into pairs.

  • Periods into sections, sections into movements or songs and

  • movements into symphonies, concertos, et cetera, or songs into albums.

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  • There are, however, a couple of other things to add in here.

  • The first of which is the motif or motive.

  • Many melodies and phrases make use of concise musical signposts or motives.

  • These are usually short musical statements that are easily

  • recognizable by their strong rhythmic or intervallic character.

  • Motives are often repeated considerably and developed and varied

  • both rhythmically and melodically during the course of a piece.

  • Probably the most famous music motive in Western classical music

  • is found at the very opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

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  • This is fairly typical of motives, in that it is an isolated short statement.

  • Shorter, in fact, from not, what we'd normally consider to be a phrase, but it

  • could by itself, or in compilation with extensions

  • of itself, form a complete phrase of music.

  • Somewhere between phrases and sections, we have melodies.

  • But the confines of these are open ended.

  • They may or may not constitute a complete

  • section of a piece, depending on stylistic context.

  • It all depends on how long the melody is.

  • Wagner's were famously never-ending, for instance.

  • But in any case, melodies generally consist of several phrases.

  • Take for instance, the old English tune Greensleeves.

  • This displays an anacruces or pickup note, which we've already discussed.

  • The pickup here is on the last eight note, or last quiver of the six eight-bar.

  • So we got a six eight melody, which we may remember

  • is a compound duple form with two dotted crochet beats per bar.

  • The Greensleeves melody consists of four four-bar phrases.

  • These are grouped into two periods, each consisting

  • of two phrases, the antecedent phrase, which doesn't

  • come home to our tonic of G and

  • the consequent phrase which does indeed come home.

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