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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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