Trope

Table of contents

1 Linguistic usage 2 Tropes in music 2.1 See Also

Linguistic usage

A trope is a play on words, a word used in something other than what is considered its literal or normal form. It comes from the greek word, tropos, which means a "turn", as in heliotrope, a flower which turns toward the sun. We can imagine a trope as a way of turning a word away from its normal meaning, or turning it into something else.

There are four kinds of tropes:

• metonymy as in association.
• irony as in contraries.
• metaphor as in comparatives.
• synecdoche as in the distribution of the whole into the part.

In music, a trope is an unordered collection of six different pitches, what is now called an unordered hexachord, of which there are two in twelve tone equal temperament. Tropes were used by Josef Matthias Hauer in his twelve-tone technique developed just before but overshadowed by Arnold Schoenberg's.

See Also

Figure of speech