For prelude yesterday I played an arrangement of "Be Still and Know." It's a hard tune to know how to phrase. It keeps coming back to scale degree 5 and then it orbits around scale degrees 3 and 1, too. To add to the confusion about how best to inflect it, and with what mood to do so, is the fact that the text consists of words of spoken by God.
The solution, at least for yesterday, revealed itself in the course of the worship service. Right before the prelude was the chiming of the hour with a handbell playing G, which was scale degree 5. I started in the tempo of the bell and organized my phrasing around the repeated Gs in the tune.
The fact that the words of the song are the words of God made me wonder something I don't remember ever thinking about before:
How Would God Phrase?
To sum up my mulling over this probably odd-sounding question, people phrases are usually arches. That's about the best sort of basic shape we can manage. I think God's phrases would be more complete - circles or spheres.
An arch that returns to the same starting point might be as circular as we can get in a time-bound medium. Maybe the composer of this tune really struck on something profound.
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