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
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