Great Pianists on Piano Playing / Study Talks with Foremost Virtuosos. A Series of Personal Educational Conferences with Renowned Masters of the Keyboard, Presenting the Most Modern Ideas upon the Subjects of Technic, Interpretation, Style and Expression

by James Francis Cooke

Studying the Phrasing

"Each phrase in a piece requires separate study. I believe that the student should leave nothing undone to learn how to phrase or rather to analyze a piece so that all its constituent phrases become clear to him. Each phrase must be studied with the same deference to detail that the singer would give to an individual phrase. This is by no means an easy matter. More important still is the interrelation of phrases. Every note in a work of musical art bears a certain relation to every other note. So it is with the phrases. Each phrase must be played with reference to the work as a whole or more particularly to the movement of which it is a part.