[dylan604]

In a non-Archer sense of the word, how do percussionists think of phrasing? As a non-percussionist/string player, a phrase was a great place to take a breath for us regular humans that can't circular breath. The basic definition I was always given was 8 bars. That was always worked well for me. As a DJ, the 8 bars would tell me the percussionist is due for a cymbal crash ;-). I always got a chuckle when I'd get a piece of music where the composer would add a breath mark for the woods/brass players. Funny thing that breathing concept.

[yellowapple]

Depending on the context, you might actually want to "stagger-breathe" to avoid breathing right on the phrase boundary. You generally don't want the breaths to be noticeable, especially if it's in the middle of a long sustained note. Instead, you'd take a breath on one measure mid-phrase, another player would take a breath in the next measure or so, etc. to keep the note going. When I marched in a drum and bugle corps, we'd actually all have individually preassigned breath marks.

Of course, this only works well if you have multiple players per part. This ain't really practical outside of marching or symphonic/orchestral contexts.

[nerflad]

Well this gets subjective almost immediately, but in a general sense, not closely related to one instrument, I think of phrases as the music within the length of time (la dee da dee dum), as opposed to the length of time itself (1234, 1234). I wouldn't play a cymbal crash at the end of 8 bars if the musical climax didn't happen until the end of bar 9. The barlines aren't as important as the music sitting around them.