Musical phrases can be likened to the lines of a poem - it is their content, the way they are laid out and how they relate to one another that ultimately dictates how the piece is structured and how it hangs together as a complete composition. Just as a poem is comprised of letters, punctuation, words, lines, sentences and stanzas, music's structure relies on melodic and harmonic gestures that together form musical lines and sections. The success of a piece depends not only on the parts it is constructed from but how these are placed.
Look at the poem, by William Wordsworth (circa 1798), below :
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
This poem has a symmetry about it - each line is comprised of 8 syllables, there is a clear rhyming scheme present (lines 1 & 3, 2 & 4, and 5 & 6 rhyme) and, of course, the content of each line is related and appropriate to the piece as a whole.
Now compare this to the opening of a piece quoted below by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, written in 1787 :
Bars 1 & 2 can be considered the first phrase that is immediately followed by bars 3 & 4 that comprise the second phrase. The phrases are related in a number of important ways, including their rhythmic structure and the general shape - where phrase 1 ends with an ascending tonic arpeggio, phrase 2 ends with a descending dominant arpeggio. This can be likened to the rhyming of a written phrase.
When two musical phrases relate to one another in this manner - when it is clear that one phrase 'answers' another - we refer to the opening phrase as the "antecedent" and the answering one as the "consequent". These kinds of question and answer phrases are evident in large numbers throughout the classical music repertoire, as well as in many many pop and rock songs, and are often characterised by a short pause between the two halves.
Some pieces of music and poetry are made up of sentences that are less directly connected to one another by very common features, but the structure is held together nonetheless by other characteristics such as stylistically contrasting sections that are dramatically placed.
Consider the poem below, by Seamus Heaney (1979) :
Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze
where the perfect eye of the nestling blackbird watched
where one fern was always green
I was standing watching you
take the pad from the gatehouse at the crossing
and reach to lift a white wash off the whins.
There doesn't appear to be an obvious syllable structure, each line and each stanza having different rhythmic content. Also, the subject content is somewhat detached and so it is unclear exactly what the poet is getting at. However, when viewed in the context of the whole piece, called Field Work, it does sit comfortably. Equally, there are many pieces of music that are constructed of phrases that seem on the surface to be unrelated but stylistic characteristics of the piece as a whole hold the thing together (for some reason, John Tavener's Innocence springs to mind as an example!)
In song, of course, poetry and music converge and with this often comes the marriage of musical and poetic phrasing : the singer is often asked to perform a given poetic line as a musical phrase and the rhyming couplets become the antecedent and consequent lines of music.
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