inguish them by defining their extremities, their
beginning and ending--as "beginning" and "ending," without reference to
their length. This should not be attended with any serious difficulty;
at least not to the observant student who reads his musical page
thoughtfully, and attaches some meaning to the figures and motives of
the melody; who endeavors to recognize the extent to which the
successive tones appear to cling together (like the letters in a word)
and constitute an unbroken melodic number,--and, in so doing, also
recognizes the points where this continuity is broken, and a new number
is announced. Much assistance may be derived from the fact--striking
in its simplicity--that the ending of one phrase defines, at the same
time, the beginning of the next, and _vice versa_. The locating of
one, therefore, serves to locate the other. There is, usually,
something sufficiently indicative about a "beginning," to render it
noticeable to a careful observer, and the same is true of an "ending."
This is illustrated in the following:

[Illustration: Example 17. Fragments of Beethoven.]

No. 1 is from the pianoforte sonata, op. 10, No. 3, second movement;
see the original. This phrase exhibits an ending, unmistakably, in the
_fifth_ measure, and not in the fourth. Its form is therefore
irregular.

In No. 2 (from the first pianoforte sonata), the first phrase ends with
the fourth measure, obviously, for the evidence of a new "beginning" in
the following measure is perfectly clear; the phrase is therefore
regular. But the next phrase runs on to the _sixth_ measure from this
point (the tenth from the beginning of the whole), because there is no
earlier evidence of an "ending." Observe that the first phrase has a
preliminary quarter-note, the second phrase none. Turning to
Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, the very first (introductory) phrase
of No. 3 is five measures in length; the first one in No. 35 also
contains five measures; the first one in No. 16, and in No. 9, contains
three measures. The irregular phrase will be again considered (in a
different aspect) in a later chapter.

The recognition of these syntactic traits of the melodic sentence is of
great moment to the player, for they constitute the information upon
which conscious, intelligent, effective _phrasing_ depends; and without
intelligent phrasing, without a clear exposition of the formation and
arrangement of the members and phrases, full compr