It is the simplest and most durable of musical forms, extending a piece of music by repetition of a single formal section. The term is derived from the Greek word στροφή, strophē, meaning 'turn'. Contrasting song forms include through-composed, with new music written for every stanza, and ternary form, with a contrasting central section. Strophic form – also called verse-repeating form, chorus form, AAA song form, or one-part song form – is a song structure in which all verses or stanzas of the text are sung to the same music. Cambridge University Press.' Das Wandern', the opening song in Franz Schubert's song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, an example of a strophic song This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. Seguidilla chamberga: 7- 5a 7- 5a 3b 7b 3c 7c 3d 7d (April 2009)Ĭopla de pie quebrado or copla manriqueña: 8a 8b 4c 8a 8b 4cĬompound Seguidilla: 7- 5a 7- 5a 5b 7- 5b You can help by converting this article to prose, if appropriate. This article is in a list format that may be better presented using prose. Muwashshah was typically in classical Arabic, with the refrain sometimes in the local dialect. The forms in modern English verse which reproduce most exactly the impression aimed at by the ancient odestrophe are the elaborate rhymed stanzas of such poems as Keats' Ode to a Nightingale or Matthew Arnold's The Scholar-Gipsy.Ī strophic form of poetry called Muwashshah developed in Andalucia as early as the 9th century C.E, which then spread to North Africa and the Middle East. The briefest and the most ancient strophe is the dactylic distych, which consists of two verses of the same class of rhythm, the second producing a melodic counterpart to the first. Among these were the Sapphic, the Elegiac, the Alcaic, and the Asclepiadean strophe, all of them prominent in Greek and Latin verse. With the development of Greek prosody, various peculiar strophe-forms came into general acceptance, and were made celebrated by the frequency with which leading poets employed them. The arrangement of an ode in a splendid and consistent artifice of strophe, antistrophe and epode was carried to its height by Pindar. But it was the Greek ode-writers who introduced the practice of strophe-writing on a large scale, and the art was attributed to Stesichorus, although it is probable that earlier poets were acquainted with it. It is said that Archilochus first created the strophe by binding together systems of two or three lines. But the Greeks called a combination of verse-periods a system, giving the name 'strophe' to such a system only when it was repeated once or more in unmodified form.

In a more general sense, the strophe is a pair of stanzas of alternating form on which the structure of a given poem is based, with the strophe usually being identical with the stanza in modern poetry and its arrangement and recurrence of rhymes giving it its character. Strophe ( / ˈ s t r oʊ f iː / STROH-fee Greek στροφή, turn, bend, twist, see also phrase) is a concept in versification which properly means a turn, as from one foot to another, or from one side of a chorus to the other.

Strophes synonym