Eichah Trope Symbols

Introduction

The lessons that follow presume that you are already familiar with Tropes and cantillation of Torah or Haftarah texts. We are skipping all of the theory and going right to the melodies of the Tropes.

Coloring the Trope Symbols

We've colored the Trope symbols so you can easily tell which are the vowels and which are the Trope symbols. The Trope symbols have Hebrew or Aramaic names, and they have short melody motifs. In the lessons that follow, you will learn to recognize the Trope symbols and the melody motifs that they represent.

In the exercises and readings, you can turn the colors on or off with “Color the Trope by Its Pause” in “Customize.”

Remember: Red means stop. Orange means pause. Green means continue or go on.

There are 27 Tropes. Each of the lessons that follow teaches you small groups of these Tropes.

Each Trope has a different shape and name. 14 of them end phrases: all of the red Tropes and most of the orange ones.

The other 13, the rest of the orange Tropes and all of the green ones, are helper Tropes that complete the melodies of the phrases.

All the lessons to follow are organized around these 14 phrase-ending Tropes and their 13 helper Tropes. A combination of a green Trope and a red Trope, or a green Trope and an orange Trope, shows that those two words are closely related, such as a “noun + adjective”, a “verb + adverb”, or a “verb + direct object”, and other such word-pairs.

Trope symbols also mark the syllable to be accented in each word. The Trope symbol is found above or below the accented syllable in most Biblical words. Where there are exceptions, TropeTrainer usually shows a second Trope symbol on the accented syllable.

The Main Point of These Lessons

The main point of the lessons on the following pages is to help you learn and memorize the Trope symbols and their musical motifs. The lessons and exercises are designed to teach you by example and repetition.

We strongly suggest that you do these lessons three to six days a week. Just as in learning your favorite new songs and music, the more often you hear this, study this, and repeat this, the sooner and easier it will be to learn these Tropes!

If you only do these lessons once a week, you will likely forget what you learned in the previous session, and you will have to work much harder to learn and retain this material.

Trope Symbols

The exercise shows the Tropes used in chanting Eichah (Lamentations). These are the melodies you will be learning.

Some users may want to skip to the last tutorial in this set. This tutorial lists all of the common Trope groups found in Eichah (Lamentations).