Books › A Practical Guide to Violin-Playing, 1913 › scan 127
Scan 127
A Practical Guide to Violin-Playing, 1913
13 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 109. See the scan on archive.org.
1CHAPTER XVI.
2ON PHRASING AND STYLE.
4No better interpretation of the word "Phrasing" is to be found than that given in Grove's "Dictionary of Music and Musicians."
6"A musical composition consists of a series of short sections of various lengths called phrases, each more or less complete in itself, and it is upon the independence of these phrases and upon their connection with each other, that the intelligibility of music depends. The phrases are analagous to the sentences of a literary composition.
8The relationship of the different phrases to each other and to the whole work forms no part of our present subject, but may be studied in the article Form; what we have at present to do with is the proper rendering of the phrases in performance, that they may be presented to the listener in an intelligible and attractive form.
10The process by which this is accomplished is called Phrasing, and is perhaps the most important of the various elements which go to make a good and artistic rendering of a musical composition. Rousseau (Dictionnaire de Musique) says of it:—'The singer who feels what he sings, and duly marks the phrases and accents, is a man of taste.' But he who can only give the values and intervals of the notes without the sense of phrases, however accurate he may be, is a mere machine. Just as the intelligent reading of a literary composition depends chiefly upon two things, accentuation and punctuation, so does musical phrasing depend on the relative strength of the sounds, and upon their connection with and separation from each other. If we now consider more closely the causes and consequences of a variety in strength of notes of the phrase we notice the necessity for an accent on the first note of every bar, and in certain rhythms on other parts of the bar also."
12It may be taken for granted that the mode of phrasing in violin playing is similar to that in connection with singing, at least so far as 'cantabile' phrasing is concerned. The violinist depends just as much on the length of his bow as the singer on the length of breath. Not only can the violinist 'sing' on his instrument and 'breathe' with his bow, but the control of all the various bowings and niceties of accentuation stamps him (when really a great musician
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