TROPE (MUSIC)

In music, a 'trope' is one of three things.

Contents

In Jewish religious liturgy

In Medieval music

In 20th-century music

In Jewish religious liturgy

Main articles: Cantillation

In Jewish liturgy, tropes are musical phrase contours (cantillations) which are applied to the words of a sacred text during public readings. It also refers to the markings in some copies of those text to indicate the vocalization.
It is not known whether trope developed from a single form used in the ancient Temple. Following the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the Jews, diverse trope systems have developed regionally. As Jews continue to move about the world, it is possible to hear these variants in the same synagogue by different readers.
Different trope apply to different parts of Tanakh (the books that largely overlap with what is referred to by Christians as "the Old Testament"). Within any regional tradition, there are different trope for Torah (first five books of the Bible), versus Haftorah (Neve'im or "Prophets" (e.g Isaiah)), or various "megillot" or scrolls used on particular occasions, such as the reading of Esther at Purim.
Within Judaism, the standard accepted text of Tanakh is the Hebrew Masoretic Text. Words in the Masoretic Text contain three sections: the letters (consonants), vowel points, and trope. These cantillation marks are called ''te'amim'' in Hebrew, and the markings are standard, even though the pitch contours they represent to the reader may differ.
The trope are not random strings but follow a set and describable grammar. For more information, refer to [Jacobson, Joshua. Chanting the Hebrew Bible: the art of cantillation. 2002.]

In Medieval music

From the Greek tropos meaning ‘turn’ or ‘turn of phrase.’ The Latin form of the word is tropus.
From the 9th century onwards, trope refers to additions of new music to pre-existing chants in use in the Western Christian Church.
Three types of addition are found in music manuscripts:
(1) new melismas without text (mostly unlabelled or called trope in manuscripts)
(2) addition of a new text to a pre-existing melisma (more accurately called prosula, prosa, verba or versus)
(3) new verse or verses, consisting of both text and music (mostly called a trope, but also laudes or versus in manuscripts). The new verses can appear preceding or following the original material, or in between phrases.
In the Medieval era, 'troping' was an important compositional technique where local composers could add their own voice to the body of liturgical music. These added ideas are valuable tools to examine compositional trends in the Middle Ages, and help modern scholars determine the point of origin of the pieces, as they typically mention regional historical figures (St. Saturnin of Toulouse, for example would appear in tropes composed in Southern France). Musical collections of tropes are called ''tropers.''

In 20th-century music

In certain types of atonal and serial music, a trope is an unordered collection of different pitches, most often of cardinality six (now usually called an unordered hexachord, of which there are two complementary ones in twelve-tone equal temperament). Tropes in this sense were devised and named by Josef Matthias Hauer in connection with his own twelve-tone technique, developed simultaneously with but overshadowed by Arnold Schoenberg's.