Please help me link punctuation marks to musical phrasing

Cafe Society
1

Just looking for some good metaphors here…

Some E.G.'s:

Exclamation point = accented note

Question mark = any kind of quality left ‘open’ at the end of phrase (multiple notes on final bar aka feminime rhyme, unsettled chord on final bar, unsettled melody note on the tonic chord in final bar)

Semicolon = settled small segment; followed by another segment that expands it into a larger closed entity. Think of the song “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing)”. The title lyrics part is the ‘settled small segment’, and the following ‘doowah’ section expands it into a larger entity.

Comma? Colon? Brackets? Tilde?

Also these are not punctuation marks but…

CAPITAL LETTERS = LOUD

lowercase letters = quiet

What gave me the idea atm was that I was playing “The First Noel” and I told my mom it was interesting that the song ends on the 3rd note in the scale instead of the tonic. She replied, “So it ends on a question mark?”

2

You know, I never noticed that at all, but it does.

Anyways, a comma is a breath mark, while a period ends a phrase. A tilde is that little turn that is represented by a tilde. A colon is a half-cadence, since it cannot end the piece. with brackets, you already took soft, so I’m not sure.

3

An apostrophe is a grace note, especially if it’s at the beginning of the word.

An ellipsis is a long, quiet bridge.

Quotes are long ties or slurs.

4

A Caesura marking comes from the concept of a caesura in poetry. I tell my students that they are train tracks.