music is as music does

I had voice lesson today.

One of the classes at the school of music is a vocal pedagogy class. Part of it is for the students to give voice lessons to other students. I'm also taking trombone lessons as part of my major. It's my main instrument.

There's something I've bee noticing lately...

There are things you can do when you're singing that you can't do when your playing an instrument. I don't mean say text either.

A little while back, I went to a performance of a Wolf Leiderbuch. During the performance sometimes the singers would swell multiple notes that are part of a larger phrase...and that's okay. Today in my voice lesson, I was told to slide into notes to give them more connection and that that was correct. I've also heard people do this too.

If I tried to pull that kind of stuff in my trombone lessons...it wouldn't fly.

I've also never heard from anyone, other than vocal people, that this stuff is the musical thing to do. I've always heard that we don't want to swell individual notes because it's what immature musicians do...and even on the trombone, you aren't to slide around to the notes, even though that's what you do. You try to minimize the uncertainty between the notes and get pure tone.

I just think it's interesting that both are acceptable even if both are performances from the same time period.

I also think it's interesting that a lot of times, it's said that the instruments were meant to imitate the human voice. They also sometimes say to play something as if you were singing it.