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:

This is not an innuendo, but....

Ok, I know. I have conversations that would make a normal person think I needed to be on heavy medication, or that I was on heavy medication, or maybe make them question their belief in a just and caring god. I watch cartoons for fun, and not just cartoons, foreign cartoons that aren't even in English. I am (even right now!) completely surrounded by literally thousands of recordings of classical music, many of which wouldn't be recognized as music by people that I talk to every day. I roll down the street playing Shostakovich and John Adams and Mahler at obnoxious levels. I actually like listening to Messaien. So I'm in absolutely no position to take any kind of viewpoint that questions how other people enjoy themselves.

But driving home from Ligonier last night, Lauren and I saw this license plate cover on a big blue pickup truck, and thought... what the hell?



You can buy it here!

I hear they keep sheep in the window (a.k.a. Concert Review: Ligonier)

I should note that I am typing this on my laptop from the passenger’s seat in Jon’s car.

With that out of the way, allow me to give you a report of our concert tonight in Ligonier, PA. This is probably the farthest that any of us travels to do a concert, but there’s definitely a reason that we do so. The crowd was phenomenal. (Case and point: we’re standing at the end taking the applause, and some guy in the back starts shouting “YAY TROMBONES!” This gets my approval every time.)

We had an unusual setup for the trombone section tonight with the thirds sitting behind the firsts and the seconds. It was a delight to actually hear the third part instead of having it get mixed with the tubas and euphoniums all the time. Jon calls the experience “like being in a warm insulated cocoon, surrounded by all three parts”. I think he’s a little tired, but I’m not going to question, because he’s behind the wheel.

Jon also reports that he was having a battle with the key of C, particularly the whole “B” idea. I, personally, was just having issues seeing. It was a cloudy, overcast evening, which played havoc with the page on the far side of the stand for me. I think I only missed about a third of the notes, however.

As much as both of us hate playing the march “Them Basses” by composer G.H…. something. The music is in the trunk, and I’m not going to crawl back there and find it. Anyway, we both hate that piece, but tonight we kicked it old school. There’s nothing like a bunch of low brass playing the melody and ignoring pretty much everything around them.

But seriously- what's this all about?



And now we’ve just passed a drive-in movie theater that had gerbils on the screen. I think I fear for my life, so this is Lauren, signing off from… somewhere east of Pittsburgh.