Over the last several years, we have been examining the way in which trombone players move their right arm and consequently the trombone slide to change the pitch of their instrument. In that work, we have found that professional trombone players use less muscular activity than other adult performers to move the slide (Lammers, 1983), use their wrist more than nonprofessionals (Lammers & Kruger, 1991), and move the slide faster than nonprofessionals (Kruger, Lammers, Stoner, Allyn, & Fuller, 1996). Professional and student performers were also found to differ in the distance they moved the slide to reach each of the seven positions on the trombone slide. Differences were most notable in the longest positions (Kruger, Lammers, Fuller, Allyn, & Stoner, 1997). Professionals move the slide further and more accurately when reaching for the sixth and seventh positions. Both professionals and students move the slide further between first and second position than is recommended by any of the method texts we’ve examined.
We have been studying trombone performance with several goals in mind. One goal is to develop a better understanding of expertise in skilled movements. Trombone performance is an excellent example of a natural task with wide variability in performance. It is also interesting because accurate motion in itself does not necessarily lead to musical performance. Consequently, it is interesting to see whether or not experts are able to attend to musical demands more than other performers simply because they have automated the process of moving the trombone slide to a greater degree. We have also been interested in using careful descriptions of what skilled performers do in order to challenge or confirm the folk wisdom developed by teachers of trombone performance. For example, we’ve found that performers with longer arms do not as a consequence perform better than those with shorter arms. We hope to be able to develop a clear set of recommendations that will be instructive to applied music teachers.