[Trombone-l] Clams and Perspective

[dslide13@aol.com]

Thanks for your insight.  To take it a step further, in non-improvised 
music a stutter could be perceived as nothing more.  As long as the 
main idea is communicated, the composer's intent has been met.  I don't 
think scriptwriters get too upset about a mistake here or there as long 
as there is a sincere performance at the core.  I could be wrong.  It's 
happened.

Bottom line, we can all probably tell when someone fluffs a note but is 
prepared as opposed to someone missing a note because they're 
unprepared.

David Gibson
trombonist/educator
www.jazzbone.org




-----Original Message-----
From: Samuel Keyser <keyser at MIT.EDU>
To: trombone-l at server5.samford.edu
Sent: Sat, 1 Apr 2006 13:45:06 -0500
Subject: [Trombone-l] Clams and Perspective

  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
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