Verse or Stanza?

From time to time, people besides Dave post things on Rotundus that may be of interest to the readers. This is another one of those times.

Some people are very adamant about using the term "stanza" as opposed to "verse". Curious, I did some looking around yesterday to see why that might be. The criteria for stanzaic form is a fixed number of lines in each stanza and a shared rhyming scheme. That does sound about right, but it seems that "stanza" is more of a poetic term than a musical term. Wikipedia claims that with regards to music, a "stanza" is more commonly referred to as a "verse".

But wait, isn't "verse" also a poetic term? Indeed, and when used as a poetic term, it usually refers to a line of poetry or to metrical poetry. But like many other words in English, "verse" has multiple meanings, and in this case refers to a formal section in a song. This definitely sounds more vague than the definition for "stanza". To go into the details of musical form is beyond the scope of this post (there's enough to write an entire post dedicated to it, maybe even a series), but I also don't want to leave people hanging. The psalms and hymns that we sing in church are in strophic form, and the sections in this form are commonly referred to as verses.

So which is more correct, "verse" or "stanza"? For the purposes of settling the argument, I think both are fine. I'll personally be sticking with "verse", as "stanza" seems to refer just to the text of the psalms/hymns and not to the complete psalm/hymn with the music.

Those of you who feel strongly for stanza, I'd be curious to hear why you believe it's more appropriate. Everyone is welcome to comment though. I'd be especially interested to hear what someone more knowledgeable about music has to say (Frank?).

Comments

Hmn. Interesting post.

Would a song still be considered to be in strophic form if there were to be a bridge of some point that might pop in at some point in the middle of the song?

I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this one, but in generally the more structured or high-culture a part of a song is the more likely I'd be to label it a stanza as opposed to a verse.

Would a song still be considered to be in strophic form if there were to be a bridge of some point that might pop in at some point in the middle of the song?

Having a bridge at some point in the song would make it no longer strophic form. An interlude, on the other hand, doesn't have this effect.

My take on this is that, in our Book of Praise, we should distinguish between stanzas in the Psalms and verses in the hymns. The only reason for that would be to make clear that a stanza in a Psalm can often encompass several verses of the text of a Psalm. But on the scale of important issues, this is way, way down there.