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“Most Christmas carols are what’s called strophic songs and depend on the words changing to extend the song out,” he said.

Jazz standard song form — Jazz utilizes many different forms, but one very common form is closely related to the strophic and variation forms.

Many, if not most, of the songs are strophic, with the same music repeated three, four or five times for different verses.

The massive space of the Albert Hall was perfect for this work, evoking not just the strophic religious responses on which Boulez based the piece but the antiphony of the Italian baroque, too.

Often the songs were surprisingly staid strophic structures; it was the composers’ choices of texts that give them their oddity, and the music, in turn, worked as a comic foil.