If this is your first time to visit my blog, welcome! My name is Jordan and I’m a conductor, teacher, and music-lover. This is my blog, the Conductor’s Notebook. To get an overview, visit About the Blog.
In part 1 of this 2-parter, I discussed the importance of writing as a form of thinking for musicians of all types. Check it out by visiting Part One: In Praise of Paper.
Here’s Part Two: What to Write About • Growth
Thinking on Paper: What to Write About
Returning to notebooks: as I said, being the good minimalist that I was, I missed out on the original Moleskine craze in the 90’s, so since then, I’ve been making up for lost time... While I started this essay by mentioning my love of writing, I have to admit, personal writing was not a part of that interest until recently. If you wold have put this bug in my ear in 2018, I might have said: “Ok! You’ve convinced me. I’ll start writing more often. But what should I write about?” Here are a few ideas.
My stack of Moleskine notebooks. I like the uniformity of design with varying colors.
I’ve already mentioned rehearsal observations, interview notes, and notes from special events like lectures and even concerts as a go-to use case for professional use. Here are some others that show up for me in the music world.
First, I have become much more serious about reflective practice: regularly sitting down with my notebook (and occasionally a voice memo if it’s a week with too much driving and not enough sitting!) and try to reflect on how my most recent rehearsal or conducting class went and try to work out what I can do to improve my work next time. This could also be paired with watching video. I’ll often sit on our deck (pictured above) and listen to the birds sing and the trees shuffle while I write. There are at least three categories of activity to think through on paper when aiming at professional reflection:
What worked/didn’t work this time?
What should we work on next rehearsal/class?
What should I work on in the meantime to improve my rehearsal technique/teaching?
Second, I am deep into my DMA at this point and currently gearing up to write my terminal document (colloquially known as a dissertation, although what I will produce is a bit different and idiosyncratic to music and Peabody-Johns Hopkins). These notebooks have been helpful to no end in helping me work out my thinking about the broad topic I’m tackling, which is rehearsal technique. This might look like an individual topic-specific page to collect short thoughts, a quick dated memo to look up a source or collect notes about a source, or an idea that came to me while coaching a conductor.
Working with Gustav Meier at a workshop in Mexico in 2008. Just under the non-Barenreiter score the right, you can just barely see a bit of his green notebook (at bottom) that he was using at the time to make notes on all of us.
Third, I recently recalled a long-forgotten detail about my dear teacher, Gustav Meier. Mr. Meier was well-known as a copious note-taker on each conductor he worked with. It was a massive upgrade to working memory, but I have to believe that the “thinking on paper” principles discussed last time (and discussed at length in The Extended Mind) played a major role as well. Since that time, I have come to use that same method to extend my thinking, making notes on the conductors I have the privilege to work with: everyone from the world’s finest, to the wealth of colleagues and mentors who I learn from, to (more recently, and like Mr. Meier) my conducting students and coaching clients. How I wish I could have asked to see a few pages of Mr. Meier’s notebooks to see how he organized the information! While I don’t know how specifically he used them, I know how I have used them. Not only have they helped me to recall what I saw, they have forced me to think about what I saw. Here are some examples:
I’m observing a teacher, colleague, or student and I’ve noticed an effective gesture I’d like to add to my repertoire. While I can’t really diagram it per se, I can certainly label what I see! Phrases like “thrown open,” “medicine ball drop,” and “Jazz 3” appear in my notes. These won’t mean much to you without some explanation, but they reinforce to me what I saw, when, who, and with what repertoire.
Later when I’m trying to develop my approach to a passage during my score prep, I might recall those same terms to help me create a plan of attack. That still doesn’t mean I will necessarily use that gesture, but it will call to mind the spirit of the gesture in a way that I find meaningful and specific, helping me to avoid becoming too mannered about my approach. This harkens to the “Power of Metaphor” one of the Sources of Power (our best cognitive resources) detailed by Gary Klein in his bestselling book by the same name.
I hear an interesting quote or story. I’ve been thinking about musical epistemology, which relies heavily on apprenticeship, tradition, received wisdom, and reverence. These are all valuable forms of knowledge which can be interrogated and integrated alongside more rigorous methodologies, and they are particularly valuable when trying to work in a humanistic pursuit like music. I have found it useful not to expect that I’ll be able to recall these stories later if I don’t note them down - and try to add a word or two about the connections I draw - to add my own thinking to the mix.
I want to argue. A great deal of conducting is about disciplining ourselves, both to ourselves, as well as to our teachers, the needs of our students and colleagues, and the requirements of our positions. Sometimes, we learn things that we don’t understand or even disagree with. It’s great to get these down on paper so that we remember to wrestle with them later, and try to glean as much as we can out of that disagreement.
A few miscellaneous points:
I’m not alone. My dear friend and wonderful conductor Chris Dobbins prefers handwritten rehearsal plans. Friend and outstanding composer Jamie Leigh Sampson writes every day.
Depending on who is reading, this may seem quite banal and obvious, or it might seem like we’re a bunch of revolutionary luddites. What’s interesting to me is that, much more than a style or personal preference, I believe notebooks represent a time- and science-tested way of thinking more clearly, in the physical world, something that goes far beyond merely capturing data into digital storage, as Annie Murphy Paul so successfully demonstrates.
As a college professor who frequently works with fellow-travelers, I’m highly motivated to think clearly about how human beings learn, in an age when it seems as though AI is poised to openly compete for an increasing number of jobs in the coming decades. Notebooks disentangle us from AI, the sewers of the internet, and help us cultivate our own voices. I see a disturbing number of young people surrender many aspects of identity if it is not some how capture-able by a camera and reducible to a digital artifact. I myself was once both young and inclined to engage with the world in that way. There’s a better way! It’s a point best articulated by Paul, among others, but we need to do everything we can to create a society that does not collapse down into a handful of content farms managed by a few feudal tech lords.
Importantly and relatedly, notebooks don’t represent a breach of etiquette the way that hopping on tablets and phones while talking with friends or listening to a talk or class. Unlike the digital, no matter how innocently intended, notebooks on the other hand create a sense of heightened intimacy! They say:
What you’re saying is so important to me, I want to write it down, but I also want to stay away from my distracting devices so that I can be completely focused on what you have to say.
These are just a few ways to use these notebooks to think clearly in the context of professional work. There are dozens more! All that to say, where I once passively observed rehearsals, now I actively glean from rehearsals, attempting to suck the marrow from each suggestion, gesture, and event as it unfolds, marking not just my score, but also writing in my notebooks.
An example of one of my rehearsal observation notebooks, heavily redacted to preserve the anonymity of all involved.
Growth
Lastly, like everyone reading this (well, almost everyone), I’m a human being. I have been using my notebooks to figure out all kinds of personal decisions, in part, by slowing down long enough to really think clearly. A great way to do this is to inscribe my thoughts on paper. In other words, the slowness of handwriting isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. I embrace the slow!
I have watched other conductors’ rehearsals for years, but now I glean from rehearsals!
I have found that the time it takes me to slow down and patiently handwrite to myself in complete sentences, in a place that is not meant for public consumption online, has been one of the single biggest game-changers for my mind and spirit in the past three years in terms of clarifying my thoughts and feelings on everything from personal stress, to ideas for artistic ventures, to programming an exciting concert, to deciding whether and when to propose to my spouse—I did, it was December 21, 2022, and she said YES!! This idea veers strongly into the personal and spiritual domain for me, and I have engaged in deep reflections on not just my teaching and conducting but my marriage, my family, and my friends and other important relationships. I’ve also investigated difficult moments of rejection as well as tried to think clearly about moments of success: both to memorialize the highs as a balm for future challenges, and to think clearly about those highs, which sometimes can lead to new challenges that require careful thought.
What I have found most interesting is the way in which these efforts, many of them meant solely for my own personal edification and growth as a human being, have unwittingly redounded directly to my skill as a conductor. Conducting as a musical and physical skill requires an enormous number of related skills, but conducting as a profession requires all of those and many more - and high reflectivity, intellectual curiosity, and emotional intelligence are among them. These journals have helped me to cultivate these areas, throwing a net around fleeting thoughts, and consolidating and organizing all of the many streams of thought that go floating by.
In short, what I started doing mostly for personal reasons, has quickly morphed into an enterprise of growth in other domains, and a cornerstone of my daily practice as a human being. And the results have been noticeable to myself and others. I started something like “morning pages” on January 1, 2021, in the heart of the first full winter of the post-COVID world in which we all now live. This provided a natural experiment - where I had some time away from many of the individuals I know to grow - returning and trying to see what is landing for others. As undesirable as the time apart from so many friends and loved ones due to travel and gathering restrictions, it gave me time to grow. By 2023, say, many people who hadn’t seen me in person since before the pandemic had remarked to me not only about my improved centered-ness and grounded-ness as a person, but of my improved presence on the podium.
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I can’t say there is a single quality of a conductor that I’ve mastered, but I can say that these notebooks have helped me accelerate my growth in all of them, and I can’t recommend them highly enough!
While this blog will always be a place to share rough drafts and other serviceable ideas, for me, it is not the place to develop my thinking from absolute scratch. Along with some digital tools, I rely on my my beloved Moleskine notebooks to do that job - in short, they are a delight to write on, and their premium quality is a signal to summon my best thinking on the matter at hand. Are you a paper and pen person? Get in touch and let me know what you’re planning and how you’re planning it!