dc wrote: > I'm afraid this question has already been asked, possibly by me! > > How many verses can decently be put under the same music without it > becoming very hard to read? I'd say three or four at the most, but I'm > no singer, so I'm not sure even four is not too many. This is a cultural issue. In Europe, even in the most recent hymnals, the custom is to underlay a single stanza, with the others below or on a facing page. In the US, the custom a century ago was to usually underlay three or four stanzas in the staff, and place the balance below or on a facing page. The layout appears to have been the deciding factor; if there was an odd number of total stanzas, then three stanzas were underlaid; if there was even number, then two or four were underlaid.
As others have noted, in more recent US hymnals, as many as six or seven stanzas are underlaid. When this happens, however, there is generally a subtle division in the underlay, in that the six stanzas are not all uniformly spaced, but rather the first three and the second three are uniformly spaced, with either a slightly larger inter-stanza spacing between stanzas 3 and 4, or perhaps a line whose length is approximately the duration of a quarter note in the music between those stanzas. I have more rarely seen in a six stanza item, where the stanzas were logically in couplets (that is the pairs of stanzas 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 and 6 each formed a single cohesive logical idea--the punctuation at the end of stanzas 1, 3, and 5 were semicolons or commas, and the punctuation at the ends of stanzas 2, 4, and 6 each formed a full stop), where this was indicated in the music by inserting the same type of line break. Note, too, that in some cases more than one layout of the same tune is produced, one for those who will be singing, and a different one for the accompanist, and that the two layouts do not always exactly match. The layout for the singers may have several stanzas underlaid where the one for the accompanist has only one stanza underlaid (to reduce ambiguities about exactly how syllables are to underlay the music), with the balance below or on a facing page or below. ns _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
