Trope (music) - Citizendia

In music a trope is:

1 In Medieval music
2 In 20th-century music
3 See also
4 Sources
5 Further reading

In Medieval music

From the Greek τροπή (tropē), "a turn, a change" and that from τρέπω (trepō), "to turn, to direct, to alter, to change". Music is an Art form in which the medium is Sound organized in Time. Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly The Latin form of the word is tropus.

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). The 9th century is the period from 801 to 900 in accordance with the Julian calendar in the Christian / Common Era.

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). Atonality in its broadest sense describes Music that lacks a tonal center, or key. In Music, serialism is a technique for composition that uses sets to describe musical elements, and allows the manipulation of those In Mathematics, the cardinality of a set is a measure of the "number of elements of the set" In Music, a hexachord is a six-note segment of a scale or tone row In traditional Music theory a complement is the interval which when added to the original interval spans an Octave in total Equal temperament is a Musical temperament, or a system of tuning in which every pair of adjacent notes has an identical Frequency ratio. 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). Josef Mattias Hauer ( March 19, 1883 &ndash September 22, 1959) was an Austrian composer and music theorist Twelve-tone technique (also dodecaphony, especially in British usage twelve-note composition) is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Arnold Schoenberg ( pronounced ˈʃøːnbɛrk (13 September 1874 &ndash 13 July 1951 was an Austrian and later American Composer, associated with

Sources

Planchart, Alejandro Enrique. Cantillation is the ritual chanting of readings from the Bible in Synagogue services. 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

Contents

In Medieval music

In 20th-century music

See also

Sources

Further reading