For Irish dance music, I wouldn’t pursue the analogy that far. As Bill points out, listening is everything, so that when you come to read the dots you don’t take them as literally as some unreconstructed classically-trained people not familiar with the tradition tend to do. Mis-phrasing largely seems to result from not realising that in Irish dance music, what I believe is called the up beat is important. The phrase generally begins not at the start of a bar, but with the note or two shown at the end of a preceding bar. When explaining the structure of a tune to people not so familiar with ITM, I break each 8-bar part down into what I call four “building blocks”, so that they can more easily both understand the phrasing and realise where the partial or complete repeats come in a tune.
One of my recurring rants is the fact that the black-dot people could do a lot more to make the music more intuitively readable by simple devices like not beaming notes that belong to different phrases together, and laying out the tune in a way which shows the building blocks directly below each other (indeed if they used the “ditto” symbol for entire phrases, they would make it even easier for people to see the pattern of repeats).
bill mentioned closure (for good reason). for those further interested i believe there’s a very detailed and informative article on tim britton’s web site.
Learning to phrase is about learning to understand the musical ideas that make up tunes. This is one reason why absorbing sean nos singing is important. It’s another window into phrases and musical ideas in Irish Traditional Music.
When we begin understanding the “packages” making up the music, we gain some sense of meaning: what’s going on where, and how they can be linked together.
Pointing to Micho Russell for phrasing is a favorite of mine. A great example online is here:
One thing I’d like to highlight is the ending phrases in the turn. After the first two bars of the turn, we get two distinct 1-bar chunks. Then two more bars, and essentially two short chunks again. Then the part finishes with notes linking back to the beginning.
So, is this how the tune “goes”, or is this Micho Russell? I suggest it’s how the tune goes, and he brings out the musical packages that make up the tune. There are a handful of reels with similar construction. They don’t all do it, but it should be understood when they do, ie, you know the tune.
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