Finding musicality in sheet music

One of the challenges in finding musicality in sheet music is that the most prominent features of the notation do not directly communicate the structure of the music. For example, you may assume that one could recognise the phrasing of a melody by looking at the handy vertical bar lines and beamed notes, but unfortunately it's not so simple.

Bar lines only mark fixed periods of time, and beams can indicate melodic structure, but are also broken arbitrarily due to rules relating to the time signature. For example, beams should be broken when they cross the bar line, and in many cases, also when a beam would cross the middle of a bar.

The actual phrasing of a melody is not broken in those ways. Take the following welsh folk tune for example: I've used slurs to indicate how I intuitively perceive the grouping of this melody when I hear it.

Y Coroni

Many of these groups cross the bar line, and none of them would be indicated in the notation clearly without these phrasing slurs. Knowing where these groups are is essential to know which notes to emphases in a performance, so how do you recognise them?

Do you notice that the notes in these groups are closely spaced with regards to their intervals, and mostly fall into simple patterns like scale runs? These features are the key.

The basics of recognising phrases in sheet music

A longer note or rest is often a clear indication of a phrase boundary. Phrases commonly end with a note that is rhythmically longer than the notes used within the phrase. It is also common that phrases will end with a rest, and both of these features can be seen here:

Not all phrases can be recognised from the rhythm alone though, as in the following example. These two phrases can be recognised from their melodic structure: the first two bars follow the same melodic contour as the third and fourth, but the pattern is shifted down by a note in the scale.

The two phrases individually sound coherent because the notes all follow a smooth contour, and the leap between them also helps to differentiate them. Melodies that take a melodic pattern and repeat it at a different pitch in this way are very common.

Phrases may also have the same number of bars within a single song, commonly 2, 4 or 8 bars. The above examples were taken from a folk tune called Winter Ade (following), which has a consistent structure of two bar phrases.

Winter Ade

The effect of an anacrusis (pick up)

Melodies often begin with a partial bar, called a 'pick up' or 'anacrusis'. Functionally these notes lead into the downbeat (the first note in a bar) and make the music sound more fluid. If the first phrase in a melody starts with an anacrusis, typically all of them will. Thus, the phrases end before the bar line. This can be seen in in 'will the circle be unbroken' below:

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Melodic and harmonic discontinuity

As has been seen in several of the previous examples, a common marker of a phrase end is a melodic discontinuity, a difference in pitch that is larger than among the previous notes within a phrase:

Lili Marlene

It is often also the case that a change in phrase will also correlate with a change in harmony. Harmony is what you would hear played by a guitarist backing a singer. It is formed from multiple notes played together and underpins the structure of most western music.

Simple harmony is based on chords, which are collections of three or more notes played together. Chords have simple names like 'C' or 'D', which correspond to a group of three notes, C, E, G in the case of the C chord. Different types of chords include different notes, resulting in different tonal effects.

A chord will be held over some number of beats in a melody before changing to another chord, and these chord changes often align with a phrase change. Below I've added the chord letters to phrases three and four of Winter Ade from earlier in the article. Phrase three begins on chord of E minor, and phrase four begins on D minor.

Melodies are closely related to their underlying chord progression, and it is easy to recognise them within the notes of a melody if you know what to look for. Let's use part of the welsh folk tune Wyres Megan as an example.

Wyres Megan

The chords that go with this fragment are G (G,B,D), C (C, E, G), and A minor (A, C, E). I've written out the notes of these chords below. Do you notice that many of the notes in the corresponding bars of the melody are the same as the notes in the chord?

Harmony also explains why you can sometimes have a large leap within a phrase without it sounding like a break in the phrase. In the following tune, the chord of the first bar is E minor. There is a large jump between the first note, but it sounds coherent because both of those notes are in the chord.

Beth Yw'r Haf I Mi?

These topics are discussed in more detail in the articles Harmony for ocarina players and The relationship between melody and chords.

Another topic that you may want to look into are cadences. A cadence is a sequence of two or more chords that acts like punctuation, such as a full stop or comma. There are numerous types of cadences, and its easy to find resources about them.

When the grouping varies within a song

These shifts in the alignment of the phrasing can also change within a single song / tune. For example in 'Blow the man down', where the first phrase begins on a pick up, but a long note forces the melody to align with the bars. The music then returns to the original alignment in phrase three.

Blow the Man Down

It isn't uncommon for melodies to have varying or otherwise irregular phrasing, which can be seen in several of the examples in this article, including the first tune, Y Coroni. Music can sound rather regimental and boring if it always remains in strict lockstep with the grouping implied by the time signature.

Exercises

Try to identify the phrases in these tunes by looking for the patterns shown previously.

Branle De Bourgogne

The Carnival of Venice

My Last Farewell to Stirling

The Blantyre Explosion

Closing notes

Knowing how to perform something from sheet music in a way that sounds musical can be tricky for a new player because sheet music often doesn't directly tell you how the notes of a melody should be phrased.

As we have explored, this structure can often be recognised pretty easily from the patterns of notes, from things like note lengths, rests, melodic contours, large leaps in pitch, repeating patterns, and changes in the underlying harmony.

Once you're aware of the structure of a melody, you can make use of this information to improve the sound of your playing as discussed in Musicality: how to make your ocarina playing sound good. For example you may add a longer gap to separate two phrases audibly.

It is always worthwhile to study performances of a melody, where the phrasing and other aspects of playing style are often clearly audible. Learning to read music without having the opportunity to hear a performance is akin to reading words in a foreign language you've never heard.

There are stylistic details common to different genres, analogous to speaking with an accent. These can be internalised by imitating what you are hearing.

Lastly, it is worth noting that phrasing and other aspects of performance are subjective. Different people can perceive these things differently, and there isn't a single right answer.