If this is your first time to visit my blog, welcome! My name is Jordan and I’m a conductor, teacher, coach, and writer. I’ve never really used this space to introduce itself before, so I thought I’d take a moment to tell you about myself and about this blog, which I call the Conductor’s Notebook. Then, I’m going to talk about actual physical notebooks and the joys of thinking on paper.
You can use these links to jump to each section:
About Me • About the Blog • In Praise of Paper • What to Write
About Me
At the center of my professional life is the orchestra, its people, and its repertoire. I can’t get enough of it—and believe me, I’ve tried! For me, it matters not whether I’m working with the youngest students or the most seasoned professionals: I’m grateful to get to make music with people who want to work hard and break a sweat to serve others with the power of astonishing music. I believe strongly in music’s enduring power to change lives for the better, and I try to orient my musical activities around my belief that musicians have a “duty to care”—that, much like doctors, we have an active responsibility to use our gifts to the very best of our abilities to help others.
Conducting the Columbia Orchestra in 2023 - what a wonderful group!
Orbiting very closely nearby, perhaps equal with opportunities for music-making, is my love for teaching and coaching others to make music. This primarily comes in the form of teaching university classes such as conducting, instrumental music education methods, and orchestral performance. More recently, I also opened up a coaching practice where I work with practicing professionals to help them improve their rehearsal technique and I’ve been enriched to cheer on my colleague-clients as they have reached for greater success through our work together.
About the Conductor’s Notebook
When my conducting and teaching isn’t keeping me busy, I also love to write about music. This journey has led me to write a number of peer-reviewed articles, work as a contributor for Baltimore Magazine, and share my thoughts here at the Conductor’s Notebook. I imagine a reader who is interested one or more of the things I’m interested in: music, composers, conducting, culture, books, and philosophy.
I’ve written a number of pieces about Florence Price, one of my all-time favorite composers, as well as articles that speak to philosophy, programming, other favorite composers and works, and other moments and cultural touchstones that have stood out to me. I’d invite you to check out the backlog.
I chose my cheeky, pun-y (🎵-book) title more than anything because I see this as a place to think out loud, in a quiet space away from social media, about the musical issues that come up in my life as a conductor. I think of it almost like a journal: as a collection of drafts and log entries, open letters, interesting links, personal discoveries, music and books I love, and other ephemera that I think might be valuable to others. It is still a place where I try to maintain the ideals of the early blog movements the few remaining independent blogs: informative middle/long-form essays written with a mixed formal/informal style, and sprinkled with personality. I know I must have mentioned my cats once or twice! It’s a place to get my ideas online, but away from the freneticism of social media. As AI becomes an increasingly dominant force, I think it becomes all the more important that humans take time to think and communicate with other humans.
In Praise of Paper
Now, I’d like to praise another kind of notebook and another kind of writing. That would be the personal writing I do using my Moleskine notebooks.
Now, an interest in paper and pen might seem to date me as a Luddite to some. To tell you the truth, I used to be a committed minimalist in the mid-aughts, dutifully digitizing, selling and giving away most physical media, and getting my first iPad. I did this with the belief that I’d one day have everything, even my scores, all mashed down to a single magic screen. What an innocence we all had back then! In addition to depriving our senses of adequate stimulation, it turns out that after a while, minimalism can become a little mundane… to say nothing of the dangers of being sucked into our devices.
Since that time, I’ve become a big believer in tactile objects in the physical world as the key driver to learning and even basic mental health. Minimalist as I became, I could never get over the hurdle of my physical scores, but now I’ve proceeded in retrograde, back to the very beginning, relying heavily on physical scores, physical books, and physical journals to write in. Screens are great in moderation, but they are just one tool in the tool belt.
Since my turn to the tactile, by my count, I’ve spilled ink on over 1,200 pages in the past three and a half years, in which time I have made the paper and pen my go-to method to collect and sharpen my thoughts. What do I write? I’ve captured countless rehearsal observations everywhere from the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic, to the Pittsburgh and Baltimore Symphony Orchestras, to the best high school orchestras in Texas. It’s also my go-to place to take notes when I’ve had opportunities to conduct interviews with conductors like Mei-Ann Chen, Leonard Slatkin, and my dear teacher Marin Alsop, all of which led to my forthcoming article in the Journal of the International Conductors Guild.
Most importantly, my notebooks are the place where I write down my thoughts. I’ve become convinced that some very olde ideas about written notes and journaling turn out to stand the test of time: Writing your ideas down, on paper, in complete sentences, is one of the single most productive and efficient ways to organize your thinking on any topic. There is copious evidence to suggest that this is the Cadillac of learning methods. To examine this evidence for yourself, I want to highly recommend Annie Murphy Paul’s 2022 book, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. It is a great place to explore some of the more recent research into several related types of extended cognition (handwriting being one), told in an engaging way through interesting stories that examine the practices of artists and intellectuals from Robert Caro to Richard Feynman and explore the way that the body, space, and other people are not just add-ons but important core components of what it means to be a thinking human being.
Check out John’s complete chart on Instagram
In her chapter on “the space of ideas” she demonstrates convincingly that we need to transfer ideas out of our heads and onto artifacts like maps, models, and notebooks that we can manipulate and evaluate. That, more than help us think, these artifacts allow us to think in a far more expansive way than we could ever hope to accomplish on our own. They allow us to “offload” a great deal of information out of our heads, embedding and encoding that information into our “map” so that we can add additional thinking without having to store that information in short term memory. She takes us through well known “maps” like Darwin’s notebooks. Conductors often create elaborate diagrams of movements or whole works in order to try to comprehend the overall structure of a challenging part of the repertoire. Describing his diagram for Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, conductor John Devlin wrote, “I had so much fun filling in the details of this story, accounting for every bar of the piece in my own narrative.” In my own narrative. This is critical - John isn’t merely transferring musical ideas onto paper, he’s thinking through these ideas with paper.
While citing research into extended cognition, Paul illustrates her point by recounting an episode in which the renowned physicist Richard Feynman described thinking with paper to a skeptic who thought it was merely a record of thinking:
“No, it’s not a record,” not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?”
I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about score study and particularly about the ways in which our score is our map, and the way in which it may require a significant amount of score marking to prep it for rehearsal. This, too, is working. I have to work on my score and this is the score. A fully marked-up score does not equate to a fully learned score, but the marking certainly is a major contributor to the process of learning them. In fact, many conductors approach marking in a relatively heavy and methodical way, I think, for good reason.
What to Write ABout
In my next post, I’ll describe some of the other ways I personally use my notebooks to work out important ideas in my daily life. Here’s the link: What to Write About