Musical Tropes

Handel was a creator of skilfully set musical moods and ideas. He merged traditional German based harmonic of contrasts with Italianate - French musical rhetoric of affections, which he formulated into originally inventive expression of tonal palette. Giulio Cesare in Egitto, is on e of his all-time most successful operas. I will examine Handel ́s rhetoric based musical applications of emotive methods occurring in his Giulio Cesare, which function as opera ́s alternatives, giving narrative clues by hunting, military and pastoral tropes for different performance views.

The music of Billy Joel is long overdue for prolonged attention from the scholarly field. As Walter Everett has acknowledged, Joel’s music is often more in line with common-practice systems than with popular genres (Everett 2000), and when combined with his intuitive understanding of numerous popular styles, makes for a rich trove of harmonic interest. One of the common-practice devices Joel utilizes effectively is the evaded cadence (also called a deceptive motion). His use of this harmonic motion reveals two tropes in his music. Deceptive Love describes the complicated nature of love in ‘She’s Got a Way’ and ‘She’s Always a Woman,’ while Denied Ending describes the unfinished and unresolved quality at the end of ‘Miami 2017.’ Uncovering these tropes in Joel’s songs leads to a better understanding of the lyrics and the harmonic progressions that underlie them.

"Although tropic structures are generally linked to verbal or visual materials in culture, tropes have long been understood as primary devices in the production of music. This paper seeks to show how musical tropes affect the interpretation of musical materials by
listeners. Tropes in music will be shown to correspond to the principal semiotic functions observed in traditional linguistics: iconic, indexical and symbolic. Using audio materials, this essay explore a number of these musical tropes taken from traditional Asian and Native American music; and Western art music from Baroque, Classical and modern periods. Iconic functions are shown to include onomatopoeic musical structures. Indexical
functions involve internal imitation, repetition and restatement, and symbolic functions involve the use of sound materials evocative of specific cultural images or institutions. The paper finally suggests that linguistic, visual and musical tropes are interconnected, mutually reinforcing, and may stem from the same set of cognitive functions in human culture.

(Spanish--Espanol)
Aunque las estructuras trópicas están generalmente ligadas a materiales verbales o visuales propios de la cultura, los tropos suelen haber sido considerados unos instrumentos primarios en la producción de la música. Este artículo trata de mostrar cómo los tropos musicales afectan a la interpretación de los materiales musicales por los oyentes. Se expone como, en la música, los tropos corresponden a las principales funciones semióticas
señaladas por la lingüística tradicional: icónica, indéxica y simbólica. Utilizando materiales de audio, este ensayo explora algunos de estos tropos musicales tomados de la música tradicional asiática y nativa americana, así como de la música del arte occidental del periodo barroco, clásico y moderno. Se muestra que las funciones icónicas incluyen estructuras musicales onomatopéyicas. Mientras las funciones indéxicas implican imitación interna, repetición y reafirmación, las funciones simbólicas suponen el uso de materiales sonoros que evocan imágenes o instituciones culturales específicas. Finalmente, el artículo sugiere que los tropos lingüísticos, visuales y musicales están interconectados, reforzándose mutuamente, y pueden proceder del mismo conjunto de funciones cognitivas que
caracteriza a la cultura humana."