on clarity

Allow me to rant for just a moment about clarity.

I am the instructor of an introductory linguistics course at my university, and I have been recently grading my latest round of homework papers on semantics and pragmatics. This is the unit on context and meaning. My delightful students (they really are delightful) had a problem set on their homework asking them to propose hyponyms and hypernyms of certain words. For example, if I give them the word dog, a hyponym would be poodle and a hypernym would be animal. It's all about sets of words and meaning relations -- all poodles are dogs, and all dogs are animals, but it doesn't work the other way (all animals are not dogs, and all dogs are not poodles).

So I gave them the word soda (pop, for you locals). I expected them to suggest a hyponym like Pepsi, and a hypernym like beverage. (All Pepsis are sodas and all sodas are beverages, but not all beverages are sodas and not all sodas are Pepsis, as the makers of Coca-Cola would attest.)

Three of my students gave me the hyponym grape. I'm assuming they mean grape soda, but sorry kiddos, grape is a kind of fruit. All grapes are not sodas. If you had written grape soda, that would have been fine, but no, you couldn't have been bothered to write out the extra four letters to convey your meaning, and thus, you lose your points.

How does this relate to trombonery, you ask? Well, let's ask Eric Whitacre and his publisher, who thought it would be a great idea to combine the first and second trombone parts into one 1st/2nd Trombone part in his piece Equus.

WHERE DO WE PLAY?!

Oh, yes, and check out what we had to do in order to compensate for unclear printing failures in perhaps the coolest part of the piece.

Yeah. Spend the extra ink, and for the love of whatever you hold dear, make sure your parts are written clearly.

And better musical directions would be great, too, like this one:

on language and trombonery

How did you learn to articulate? When I was first picking up the horn, I was taught "ta ta ta". When I got to college, my instructor beat "ta" out of my head and taught me "toe toe toe", and "low low low" for legato.

Obviously, the difference here is the vowel. /a/ and /o/ are both pronounced in the back of the mouth, but /a/ is lower than /o/. That is, your tongue is farther down in the back of your mouth when you say /a/ than when you say /o/. Try saying both "ta" and "toe" and stick your finger in your mouth and feel where your tongue is and the shape. The tongue kind of curves up in the back when you say /o/.

This seems counter-intuitive. Why would you want your tongue in the way of your airstream? However, the location and shape of the tongue has another effect. Try saying "ta ta ta", and put your hand on your chin. Your jaw moves, doesn't it? Now say "toe toe toe", and feel your chin again -- not so much movement, right? One thing you don't want when you play is a lot of jaw movement -- it moves the teeth, interferes with the placement of your lips, and can generally muck up your embouchure. By using "toe" instead, with less jaw movement, we learn not to move our jaw when we play just by thinking of a different syllable.

Try holding the horn with your left hand and articulating while feeling your jaw with your right hand. Think of saying different vowels when you tongue, and feel what happens.