Trombone-Grammar and the Musical-Sentence

It seems a bit too often that you hear someone try to qualify the emotional aspects of a musical line by pointing to the "grammatical" characteristics of the sound rather than to the "effective" characteristics.

The characteristics of tonal music can be likened to syntax in language in numerable ways. A linguistic sentence is composed (and it is of no coincidence that the word "composition" is used for both music and language) with a variety of "pieces", like nouns, adjectives, prepositions, etc. Our Trombone-Grammar similarly consists of special little qualifiers like louder, softer, harder, faster, slower, more rubato, etc.

Imagine though that you are reading a sentence from your favorite book: How do you "feel" the sentence? As a collection of syntax, or as an presentation of an idea?

Let's say that a motivational speaker is writing a speech. This speech trying to convince his/her audience to be swayed, persuaded, moved, and altogether enthused by the words which are contained in the speech. At points through the course of proof-reading (read: practicing) our motivational speaker reads over a particular sentence and decides that this sentence isn't quite producing the effect that he wants. The speaker then can approach correcting the sentence in a couple ways; Which approach would he likely use?

A) "Ah, this sentence isn't quite right, it doesn't have exactly the effect that I am imagining...perhaps I should add a noun."
or.....
B) "Ah, this sentence isn't quite right, it needs to appeal more to the particular sensitivities of the age-group of my audience."

If our speaker is worth his weight in words, he would hopefully be thinking more along the lines of option B.

Options A and B for a practicing musician would go similarly:

A) "This isn't quite right, it needs to be louder"
B) "This isn't quite right, it needs to be more tense and tragic."

The term "louder" is simply a characteristic of a given moment relative to a preceding moment, and out of context doesn't "mean" anything to the listener. Instead of thinking in Trombone-Grammar, think in musical effect, something like "This isn't quite right, how can I impress upon my audience more excitement, or anxiety, or enthusiasm, or inspiriation, or joy here?" This takes into account the entire context, and approaches the "change" from the standpoint of the desired end-product.

The grammar and syntax of the language are what we might call meta-language, or language for talking about language. The Trombone-Grammar is the meta-sound, the sound language for talking about sound. Trombone-Grammar is compressed in the package of Musical-Effects.zip: you can extract the pieces out if you desire, but it doesn't work the other way around. Just as a sentence in English (or otherwise) is meant to be understood as one singular and self-contained idea, so are most musical phrases (serialism, aleatory, etc. notwithstanding).

 Simplify and consolidate your processes and your practice will be much more efficient. The more you can think of the end-product, the less consumed your mind will be with the little pieces of brass playing.

That's a really good thing.