You sometimes hear that a certain piper phrase’s a tune a certain way or words to that effect . What actually is phrasing a tune ?
RORY
Ignoring the wilful abuse of the possessive apostrophe;
“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that low’r’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried”
Imagine this spoken by Gielgud. Imagine it spoken by Kenneth Branagh. Imagine it spoken by Roy Keane. Imagine it spoken by my flat expressionless Yorkshire vocal chords.
I think it’s something like that. Let’s not try to put it into terms of rolls and semiquavers - or I suppose why not try, it does no harm.
slight deviation from topic but perhaps useful,
In a functional sense a phrase mark in notation seems (according to the www) to indicate a legato passage, but in my head it means more that “these notes are a musical sentence, they belong together”
Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan are two of the greatest masters of phrasing in song. There isn’t a singer alive who couldn’t learn by studying the choices made by either.
One of the cool things about Dylan is how many alternate takes of the songs on his first few records have been released; you can see how different each is, and consider how Dylan sculpts the song by varying the weight and phrasing of his lines.
Or he’s got a terrible memory 
PD.
A spoken sentence may be made up of one or more phrases. The phrases are broken up by brief pauses, and/or marked by vocal inflection. Similarly in a tune, you don’t just play all the notes at the same speed or the same length or the same loudness. You break it up into pieces that make sense to you. Note everyone hears a phrase the same way.
This is where ornamentation and variations really start to kick in, making the tune a personal statement in the way one breaks up the tune into phrases. Remarking on a particular player’s phrasing is a way of pointing out how someone hears something different than what has commonly been played before, suggesting something new to listeners who can appreciate the different nuances that particular player brings to the tune.
djm
phrasing is how you interpret the musical sentence at hand.
which notes/motives do you feel should have more (or less, as the case may be) rhythmic weight?
are there extremeties in the tessitura you wish to exploit?
is there a directionality in the line you feel should be punctuated with staccato, for instance,
or is there an unidiomatic turn of phrase you wish to bury in the texture?
on an UP playing ITM,
its important to deliniate the phrase tastefully, and within accepted practice, by melodic cadencing, silence, and ornamentation.
otherwise the tune will sound like a runny pudding.
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hey all
a subject dear to my heart.
as rightly stated by s1m0n above listen to the great singers or talkers in Dylans case to me he “talks in speaks, in tune” to my ears. ( I prefer Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile)
Think of rhythm as a grid, we are taught to “play” on the “lines” off the grid pattern but in fact the music can end up tedious and mechanical if you adhere to much to this - computer music for instance is probably the best example of this played perfectly at given intervals.
The music that means most to us is “humanised” and ever so slightly of beat and the great musical interpreters make use of this along with the other dynamics in music - tone production - amplitude and tempo variations etc.
Placing the notes of a phrase in front of the beat adds urgency say for dance placing them behind relaxes the mood (laid-back), punctuating (pausing) then catching up and so on.
We are very much more sophisticated than we give ourselves credit for being, Sam L is right just listen to people talking, some - many bore us to sleep while others are “great with the craic” - story telling, comedians, you can detect genuosity (easy to a musician ). They use the same techniques.
have I bored you to sleep yet?
Un.
“Phrasing is everything”
Seems almost literally true to me.
I’m surprised that no-one seems to have mentioned or at least emphasized the importance of chanter closures in this thread.
So far there’s been much discussion of rhythm, which I think is in some ways tangential to phrasing, but I think the cornerstone of phrasing for the pipes is chanter closure. The placement and duration of chanter closures, even in a primarily legato section, is what prevents it from just being a flat cascade of notes. This helps explain why the term “phrasing”, borrowed from speech and singing patterns, is used to describe an aspect of melodic interpretation.
These closures, and the minute adjustment of their duration, do act to shape and emphasize the rhythm of a piece but I think the issues of subtle shifts to the note attack timing are secondary - mostly the rhythm and swing are set by the inter-note timing and are, IMO, distinct from phrasing per se.
For fluters and whistlers phrasing is required for practical reasons - one must take breaths, and choosing when to take them is important. For lilters, various syllables are chosen for rhythmic effect and generate a phrasing of their own - stops such as “t” and “d” produce articulation in the stream of sound. Unlike many instruments, pipes are perfectly suited for doing this because we can stop the chanter on the knee and in this way produce similar effects to the various types of tongued stops (‘p’, ‘t’, ‘d’) depending on the duration and on additional techniques such as placement of cuts, barks, and slurs/slides.
In the past the use of lilting as a standard technique for teaching tunes probably made this much easier to convey.
Bill
I was just about to duplicate much of what Bill just posted. The basic phrase shape can be heard at the level of 4 bar and two bar phrases, and sub phrases, like clauses of a sentence. The chanter closure is an important mechanism for punctuate the phrase (sometimes independently of techniques such as ornamentation that emphasizes strong beat such as the 1st of 4th eighth notes in a reel).
The most common failing I hear, especially in fast, session type contexts, is playing every reel phrased 123-456 where the phrase should be 6 12 - 345 in many cases.
Learning a phrase can be very difficult
the term “phrasing”, borrowed from speech and singing patterns
I couldn’t agree more.
ever notice how much the mouths of particularly beginning pipers moves around while playing.
The motor skills involved with speech are among the most intricate and complex that we will ever master. Speaking and playing music come from the same place.
luv ya BillH 
On any bagpipe, we’re at a decided disadvantage:
robbed , by & large, of highly contrasting dynamics, articulation, sforzandi, timbral shading: no wonder its tough to learn phrasing, learning to make phrases is relatively easy: connecting them into a larger whole that is greater than the sum of its parts is difficult.
.
When I was in high school, I sang in the chorus. Our teacher taught us about phrasing early in the term, and he demonstrated it by using something that (back then) pretty much every American kid had been reciting in school at the beginning of each school day: the Pledge of Allegiance.
Since elementary school, we had all been speaking it mindlessly like this (with a slight pause at the end of each line):
I pledge allegiance
to the flag
of the United States of America
and to the republic
for which it stands
one nation
under God
with liberty and justice for all.
Probably it was taught to us this way as wee tykes to break it into chunks that would be easier to remember and easier for our little lungs to handle.
But our high school chorus teacher told us to listen to the words and the meaning of them, and to turn it into logical phrases that completed a thought. When done that way it becomes:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,
and to the republic for which it stands,
one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.
That’s good phrasing.
Just as in any other language, there are logical phrases in music that hang together, places where a pause makes sense, other places where a pause would break up a phrase jarringly and interrupt the melody.
In piping it has nothing to do with ornamentation, but rather as Bill said, it’s about closing the chanter. A piper could play with no ornamentation whatsoever and still have brilliant phrasing. The fact that good fiddlers and pipers use phrasing even though they could technically play without any break in the flow demonstrates how important phrasing is in the music.
Yes - I definitely agree that there are places where pauses can be interrupting. Even players who adopt a fully “tight” style of playing, with chanter closures almost everywhere (anybody still doing that these days?) will vary the duration of the stops to break the monotony and create some kind of phrasing.
In the case of fiddle I think the technical decisions revolve around bowing. Unless one uses exclusive “short bow” techniques (i.e. reversing the bow direction on each note), there is a technical necessity to decide when to reverse the bow direction.
Yeah, but no, but..
Actually the absence of dynamics increases the importance of understanding phrasing, which has to be achieved by judging the relative lengths of notes, and indeed of silences, however short.
“phrasing” is a metaphor as applied to instrumental tunes, but (at the risk of slight confusion) is particularly relevant in relation to songs. It’s best understood when it’s done badly. If you know the words of a song, there is nothing more horrible than hearing someone who doesn’t know them play a song air and insert gaps in the middle of note sequences that represent words or (language) phrases.
So is it something that develops as you develop as a musician or is it just an instinctive thing thats there from the start ?
Are there outside influence’s that effect the way a certain musician would phrase a tune. Would a musician from a Irish traditional background phrase differently to a musician from a different genre.
I’ve heard it said that as hard as he tries James Galway just cant play Irish music , due to his classical training. Is it down to phrasing ?
RORY
I think the answer here is the same as the answer to many things: “listen, listen, listen…”
(If James Galway listened to Irish traditional music long enough, I have no doubt that he’d be able to do it… in that respect I don’t think it’s the training he has, so much as the exposure/experience/keen-interest he doesn’t have, that makes the difference. There are certainly classically trained violinists who are able to play “authentically” in the traditional idiom - but I am sure they didn’t get it by reading stuff off the page)
And yeah, I suspect phrasing has a lot to do with it. Rhythm is probably the other biggie.
OK 2AM here, lights out now ...zzZZ
Many analogies to sentence structure are used to explain this. Delving deeper in that analogy, are there any objective units that can be used to explain phrasing in music similar to syntactic structures we see in human language: noun phrases, verb phrases, prepositional phrases, etc.?
Do some (theoretical-minded) musicians parse bars of notes into a structure where one note is like a noun, another like an article preceding that interspersed with an adjective, then followed by a verb and so forth? I realize that this is done in many slow airs, but what about tunes that have no corresponding words?
Yes, but here it verges on defining ‘the phrase’, as opposed to the operative ‘phrasing’..
there are motives, both rhythmic and melodic, sequences, stretching over the beat, or over the bar, within a phrase. Each has its own ‘cellular structure’; and almost infinite # or variants;
then it’ s up to the next phrase to contrast, confirm, or deny what the previous phrase is (hahah much like C&F Uilleann forum!!) 
usually termed antecedent, (question) and consequent (answer) phrases, they link to form a period. Each portion of the form becomes defined by strong / weak cadences, agogics, harmonic motion, and in some cases, silences, modulation, and orchestration. (way out of itm now)
classical training enables the composer/performer/improvist to choose
which features of the phrase to develop (now were into the operative ‘phrasing’),
as I said which becomes more difficult on an instrument which has scant measure of dynamics, sforzati, timbral change;
forcing the UP player into subtle rhythmic accentuation, through the use of silences, melodic cadencing, ornaments, the whole bag of tricks,
in order to make the phrase alive by phrasing.
At some point in their (AHEM) classical, literate, training; instrumental musicians are told to ‘sing with/through their instrument’ , the idea being that the human voice is most worthy of emulation by the lesser expressive devices such as instruments
(certainly not the case with bob dylan: Id have to work real hard to make a noise that repulsive on any of my instruments 
)
So imo to answer your “?”, there comes a point in which its up to the subjective interpretation of each individual musician, determined by training, tradition, experince, interest, as to how best to turn their ‘wordless’ instrumental ‘chune’ playing into a ‘vocal’, ‘cogent’ , and thus expressive and wonderfully phrased, song.
Had enough yet rorybellows? it’s only gonna get deeper from here on 
.