2.3 Melodic phrases

Here are lesson plans for two listening activities, Phrases in Songs and Phrases in Instrumental Music , and one analysis/discussion activity, Parallels between Language and Musical Phrasing , with some Suggested Music for the activities.

Goals and standards

• Grade Level - 3-12
• Student Prerequisites - The student should be able to sing a song with others, and should be familiar with the language-arts definitions of sentence, phrase, and clause.
• Teacher Expertise - The teacher should be familiar and comfortable with the terms and concepts regarding melodic phrases , and should be able to easily identify musical phrases.
• Goals - The student will learn to identify melodic phrases in vocal and instrumental music.
• Music Standards Addressed - Awareness of musical phrases helps the student sing and play with appropriate phrasing, ( National Standards for Music Education standards 1 and 2), and encourages the use of appropriate terminology in discussing music (standard 6).
• Other Subjects Addressed - The Parallels between Language and Musical Phrasing discussion encourages understanding of the relationship between language arts and music (National Standards for Arts Education music standard 8). It also addresses several of the National Standards for the English Language Arts , including reading literature from many genres (standard 2), drawing on understanding of textual features to appreciate texts (standard 3), and applying knowledge of language structure to discuss texts (standard 6).
• Follow-up - Help commit these lessons to long-term memory, by continuing to discuss phrasing when you introduce new pieces for the students to sing or play.

Phrases in songs

Objectives and assessment

• Time Requirements - With plenty of examples, this activity can take one (approximately 45-minute) class period. Or use fewer examples, and combine this activity with the next one in the same class period.
• Objectives - The student will listen to examples of vocal music and identify the phrases in the music.
• Evaluation - Assess students on their ability to accurately identify phrases in a "test" situation. Allow the students to listen to a short musical excerpt that the class has not yet discussed. Then play the excerpt again, calling on specific students to indicate by word or gesture when they hear the end of a phrase, or asking students to count the number of phrases in the example and write down their answers, or to write down the last word of each phrase. For the test, use music in which the phrasing is very clear, and not ambiguous at all, or allow for some reasonable disagreement if students can support their conclusions.

Materials and preparation

• You will need an audio tape or CD player. Alternatively you can have the students supply the music by singing songs together that they all know or that they have been learning in class. (Simple songs like "The ABC Song", "Happy Birthday to You", or "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" work just fine for this activity.) You can plan on doing both, if you like.
• Gather some recordings of songs that your students will find appealing, or decide what songs you will have the students sing together. Folk music, church hymns, and traditional children's songs all usually have well-separated, easy-to-spot phrases. Some popular music and Classical music also works well, but some has more drawn-out, complex, or motive -based melodies that are difficult to separate into melodic phrases.
• For older students, if you would also like to introduce the concepts of antecedent and consequent phrases, make certain that some of your choices of music have clear antecedent/consequent-style phrasing.
• Have tapes ready to play at the right spot, or know the CD track numbers that you will be using. Or, if it would be helpful, have copies of the words to the songs the students will sing.