[Trombone-l] Clams and Perspective

[Richardson, Timothy Mr. DAC USAG Franconia DPW]

I think this makes a lot of sense.  It goes to the definition of a clam, and
that definition can be context sensitive.  For the jazz improviser the
definition may be quite different.  

>From the performer's viewpoint, it may be as simple as "did I play what I
intended to play?"  I played the US National Anthem for a retirement
ceremony recently, and someone else from our host nation played the German
anthem on fluegelhorn.  Playing simple tunes where every single listener
knows every single note gives a more restricted definition of clams.  Start
each note cleanly on time, no fluffs allowed.  That neither prevents you
from making music, nor ensures that you do make music.  If a jazzer plays a
note he did not intend, but it is still in the chord and sounds pretty good,
I call that a clam but he might not; it is unlikely the audience will
notice.  If he fluffs the start of the note, it can be a clam or not,
depending on his intent.

French horn players used to be notorious for chipping notes.  Have you
listened lately?  Seems to have gone away.  I think they just changed their
standards.  They decided cleaner playing is possible, and revised their
standards upward.   

-----Original Message-----
From: Samuel Keyser [mailto:keyser at MIT.EDU] 
Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2006 20:45
To: trombone-l at server5.samford.edu
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