Strophic form

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In music, strophic form (or chorus form) is a sectional and/or additive way of structuring a piece of music based on the continual repetition of one formal section or block. It is the musical analogue of repeated stanzas in poetry or lyrics: where the text repeats the same rhyme scheme from one stanza to the next, the accompanying music for each stanza is either the same or very similar from one stanza to the next.

A work in strophic form may be analyzed as A A A... or A A' A"...

Contrast with through-composed, where each stanza has different music, or contrasting verse-chorus form, which alternates between two sets of music (ABAB).

In modified strophic form, the pattern is varied in some stanzas.[1]^{[dead link]}

[edit] History

Most folk and popular songs are strophic in form, including the twelve bar blues, all of which may be in simple verse or simple verse-chorus form. The "verse-chorus-verse" (verse-chorus form) of most popular music songs may be interpreted as parts of a larger strophic verse-refrain form. In addition, many songs from the classical music tradition are in strophic form, from the 14th century French Rondeau of the ars nova, to the 17th century French air de cour, to the 19th century German lieder; indeed strophic form has been one of the most durable of all musical forms, probably because it is intuitively most obvious to have similar music accompanying repeated stanzas of verse.