Trope (music)

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The term trope derives from Greek τροπή "turn, turning"1, from τρόπος - tropos "turn, direction, way"2 related to the root of τρέπω - trepō, "to turn, to direct, to alter, to change"3. The Latinised form of the word is tropus. In music a trope is:

Contents

In Medieval music

From the 9th century onward, trope refers to additions of new music to pre-existing chants in use in the Western Christian Church (Planchart 2001).

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 often called prosula, prosa, verba or versus') (3) new verse or verses, consisting of both text and music (mostly called trope, but also laudes or versus in manuscripts) (Planchart 2001). 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 (Sengstschmid 1980).

See also

  • Trope (cantillation), or trop ((Yiddish טראָפ), the notation for accentuation and musical reading of the Bible in Jewish religious liturgy

Sources

  • Planchart, Alejandro Enrique. 2001. "Trope (i)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
  • Sengstschmid, Johann. 1980. Zwischen Trope und Zwölftonspiel: J.M. Hauers Zwölftontechnik in ausgewählten Beispielen. Forschungsbeiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 28. Regensburg: G. Bosse. ISBN 3764922192

Further reading

  • Knapp, Janet. 1990. "Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?: Some Reflections on the Relationship between Conductus and Trope". In Essays in Musicology: A Tribute to Alvin Johnson, edited by Lewis Lockwood and Edward Roesner. [Philadelphia?]: American Musicological Society. ISBN 1878528009
  • Summers, William John. 2007. "To Trope or Not to Trope?: or, How Was That English Gloria Performed?" In Music in Medieval Europe: Studies in Honour of Bryan Gillingham, edited by Terence Bailey and Alma Santosuosso. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishers. ISBN 0754652394 ISBN 9780754652397

References

  1. ^ Trope, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, at Perseus
  2. ^ Tropos, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, at Perseus
  3. ^ Trepo, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, at Perseus

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  • This page was last modified on 3 January 2009, at 00:38.

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