Actually I think phrase marks are sometimes a little fussy a musician should be able to find phrases without being guided to them. In piano music you may see a 'slur,' actually a phrase mark, that extends over several measures of common time - too much for one bow or one breath. It depends on the instrument for which the music is intended. Personally I prefer to distinguish between slurs and phrase marks: the bowing or tonguing of slurred notes is pretty specific, as above, but a phrase may necessarily include some changes of bow, etc. Some writers, such as Gardner Read in his authoritative text 'Music Notation,' treat the two terms as more or less equivalent. The second note is a continuation of the first:Ī slur may be hard to distinguish from a 'phrase mark,' which looks like a slur but may cover a longer passage and really just indicates that this is one phrase, like a phrase in spoken language. On a keyboard instrument the performer just tries to join those notes smoothly together.Ī 'tie' is a similar curved line that joins two notes of the same pitch. On a bowed instrument the bow continues in the same direction on a slur, as much as possible on a wind instrument the note similarly continues without being rearticulated a singer stays on the same syllable. Question: What mark is used to indicate a slur? -J.W.Ī slur is indicated by a curvy line that begins at the first note of the slur group and continues to the last note. 166 – mm.Slurs, Ties, and Phrase Marks Slurs, Ties, and Phrase Marks

Measures 170 and 171 indicate slurs to make these short passages smooth groupings of notes without hard attacks for each note.

The last two beats of measure 169 ( half note E) is tied to the half note in measure 170 to extend the note to four beats. In the example below, measures 166 through 169 use a phrase mark to indicate that these four notes should be performed as a unified musical thought. A phrase mark is used to express a complete musical thought a tie is used to connect adjacent pitches together to produce a longer note while a slur is used to connect a group of different pitches together to produce a smoother musical line, While all three phrase marks ( phrase, slur, and tie) look the same, they each have separate meanings. However, they must be interpreted differently depending on the context. Phrase marks look the same as ties and slurs (a curved line in the notation).

Slur vs tie