[Trombone-l] Clams and Perspective

[Samuel Keyser]

My avocation is trombone playing.  My vocation is theoretical  
linguistics.  Let me put in my two cents on the discussion of clams  
and performance from the second point of view.

When you speak, you are understood (to the extent that ever happens  
in speech) because the person you are talking to has the same grammar  
in his/her head that you have. Without that shared body of knowledge,  
you might be able to communicate, but not through language.  That is  
why no communication occurs when you speak in English to someone who  
only knows French and vice versa.  So far this is not rocket science.

The same thing applies to metrical poetry.  A writer of, say, iambic  
pentameter verse expects that his/her readers will have a grammar of  
that meter in his/her head.  (Several of us have spent a good deal of  
our professional lives working on what metrical grammars look like  
and we can make good on the assertion that metrical verse is, in  
fact, a grammatical phenomenon. Take it as given for purposes of this  
discourse.)

I suspect, though I have never worked in this area, that music is  
just like metrical poetry and speech.  That is, the composer/player  
writes with the expectation that the listener will have a grammar in  
his/her head of the thing the composer/player has written/performed.   
That's what listening to music means.  It means running through the  
rules that the maker ran through to make the thing the listener is  
hearing.  Without that shared knowledge, what would be heard would  
simply be noise.

 From this perspective, when a jazz musician is performing, a  
listener can tell whether the solo is good or not even though that  
listener might not play an instrument just because the listener has  
in his/her head the same rules that the performer is using to put  
together the solo.  Seen this way, clams are simply grammatical  
errors, like say "They is here," instead of "They are here."  And  
just as we can have dialects in which "They is here" is acceptable,"  
we can have jazz dialects in which a clam becomes acceptable.  This  
is what Miles Davis was getting at, I think, when he said that in  
jazz there are no wrong notes. (I think it was Miles.)

If this last conjecture is true, then the work would be in working  
out what the rules of composition/performance are.  Several people  
have done some of that, most notably Fred Lehrdahl and Ray Jackendoff  
in a book called, I think, "A Theory of Tonal Music."  But much more  
work needs to be done and, at this stage of my life, I'd rather play  
than theorize.

Jay