Trope (music)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In music, a trope is one of three things.
[edit] In Jewish religious liturgy
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 occaisions, 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.]
[edit] In Medieval music
In the Medieval era, troping was an important compositional technique. There were two basic types of tropes: textual and musical. A textual trope involved the assigning of a new text to an existing musical melisma. A musical trope was the insertion of new notes into a piece of music, creating or extending a melisma.
[edit] In 20th-century music
In serial music, a trope is an unordered collection of six different pitches, what is now called an unordered hexachord, of which there are two (complementary ones) in twelve tone equal temperament. Tropes were used by Josef Matthias Hauer in his twelve-tone technique developed simultaneously but overshadowed by Arnold Schoenberg's.
