For the last year I have been struck by the logic of delineating musical phrases. There are several ways of doing this, depending on the music. When a phrase ends in a long tone, one can simply cut down the length of the held note to in effect insert a breath to indicate that one phrase is ending and the next is about to begin. One can alternatively insert a short pause, known as a caesura. Wanda Landowska, the first major harpsichordist of the 20th century and a fantastic pianist as well, wrote that "to allow air to circulate is like breathing a constantly renewed life into musical phrases; it gives them a relief indispensable to their comprehension. That is why all ancient treatises compare musical interpretation to eloquence. Nothing could be more annoying than those melodic lines that are never interrupted by the slightest breathing. They are comparable to an unpunctuated text or to extremely elongated spaghetti endlessly rolling with neither beginning nor end, but lasting forever!" (p. 376, Landowska on Music).