From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In Music a trope is:

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 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.

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