Week 2: Phrasing and Timing

This week, you’ll add the melody and poeticize it through phrasing and timing. Now that you know the harmonic colours, voices, and texture, this should help you discover numerous ways to interpret the melody.

First, we will use poetry itself. Poetry as performance can be delivered in numerous ways that highlight themes and their emotional ranges. Read a poem and underline key words that you would emphasize if reciting it. A few poems to give you some inspiration:

TS Eliot: The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, The Waste Land

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 18

ee cummings: I Carry Your Heart

Anne Carson: Swimming in Circles in Copenhagen A Sonnet Sequence, Spring Break Swallow Song

Margaret Atwood: No Name, Letter from Persephone, Morning in the Burned House 

Watch this video on articulation, pedal, and phrasing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF4viQlmT2w

For inspiration, listen to this performance of Concerto Op. 54: https://youtu.be/tDxa2aOQ0w0?si=99uaiefEX2vghDd1&t=57

1. Anatomy of Poetry: Phrasing

After taking time to read a few poems and imagine where you’d emphasize specific words, return to the piano to read through the melody and play it in different ways:

-up or down an octave

-in a faster tempo according to your speech/singing

-play melody as if it is a bass line

-write text to the melody and sing it

-orchestrate or arrange as another genre

-play it with varied accents or emphases

2. Anatomy of Poetry: Timing

Timing in performance is a state: we are aware that musical beats and rhythmic positions of various notes do not govern our placement of them. Rather, when we use timing poetically, we take a more open-ended attitude toward where tones are placed. Essential to timing is the element of caesura in Schumann: breaks in the line, sudden stops or cuts in the melody or texture, long fermatas, double bar lines separating one section from another etc. 

Study your score as follows:

—Find all fermatas: do they align with section changes? Does a new melody emerge after the fermata?

—Circle rests that are half-bar or full-bar length or longer (Grand Pause “GP” marks, etc).

—Locate all double bar lines: write the technical changes that take place at these bar lines, eg, key change, time signature change, texture change, new theme, etc.

—Locate any indications between two movements that signal they are related and should be played continuously, or delayed and noticeably separate from one another.

Timing practice tools:

—play the melody along with a recording and mark rubato/phrasing

—pauses may happen in one voice but not others: find voices that continue in spite of others stopping and vice-versa

—when pausing, listen to the silence carefully and think of the first note that will follow the silence: what is its character? Dynamic? Articulation? Intention?

Subtext and Listening:

Imagine silences having subtext: a deeper reason motivating the silence, caesura, or fermata at a specific time. Silences with dramatic intentions are powerful tools in timing a performance, eg, Silences can, “Interrupt a noisy character,” “Pose a question,” “Calm a stormy argument,”  “Connect two intimate voices,” or (a favourite) “Give the audience a break from an otherwise overwhelming texture.”