Student Work: Journals
Journaling: a year-long assignment
Journals are kept for the purpose of documenting your efforts and your experiences with those efforts: the amount and quality of time spent practising piano exercises, musicianship and related work; observing the transfer of skills between your musicianship and improvisatory work and your other activities, your achievements and obstacles, how you are learning to work with your difficulties, (are you smiling while you practice?) etc. Several journals of past students are available here for perusal. These are mostly personal accounts of work outside of classes; in general, journal entries are not to be conflated with class notes. Some of my own personal accounts are documented here.
By the way, once you get a real momentum with the journal, you will quite likely want to make an entry every day - even if it's relatively short… even if it is that you didn’t feel like practicing today. Some of your experiences may seem very small—too small to write about—but they may actually have a major impact on your life as a musician. I recall when I first realized that I could focus my lips just enough to create a distinct pitch but without whistling. That allowed me to sight-read through a book of melodies without disturbing anyone on the train, that is, without becoming self-conscious. And then I learned to really practice entirely internally. My experience is that making three to five entries a week would constitute a journal which is able to reflect your progress and the sense of your journey. Still, there's nothing as good as regular daily entries (which is why it's called journal.)
Below you’ll find the journals of Erika Sudirga, a proficient pianist with a full compliment of students in Toronto. Though, for the most part, the website separates the students’ musical journals from the recording projects, I have uploaded several examples of Erika’s writing; When read in parallel, they provide a clearer impression of what can be experienced in one or two years of creative music studies. Below you see her year-long musical journal from 2008-09, followed by a one-week thematized journal on “Attention.” Then you see her 2009-10 journal which begins with thematized journaling on the idea and experience of “Resistance.” [The highlighting was added by a graduate music student who was looking over these files and found those passages to be of note.]
[All student work is posted with permission of the author.]
As you see in the upper left of the first page, I make a note of the total number of words in a student submission. Although some people enjoy verbalizing their experiences more than others, and some may not like typing, the number of words still gave me some idea of how much work the student put into the journal assignment. But more important was the average number of words per sentence. This innocuous item was just a small but useful aspect of informal research that bore no reflection on grades, but I always found very interesting correlations between the length of (grammatically correct) sentences and the student's ability to generate a coherent and expressive phrase. There is something about the pacing of ideas and the depth of feeling that limits the phrase length of some players, while others spin unending run-on sentences with a succession of spindly or shapeless melodic phrases which do not easily form coherent ideas or emotional expressions. Of course short phrases can be just as powerful and expressive as longer ones (compare Beethoven and Schubert) but it did provide signifiant insight into how to teach, that is, how to help guide the creative work of a student.
Here is a sample of the same student’s work with a thematized journal—this one on “Attention.” The idea of thematized journalling was for the students to engage with a given theme for only one week (with daily entries), and that was followed by another theme or no theme at all. Sometimes a particular theme did not galvanize every student’s interest, but simply having a theme as a kind of question allowed them all to have perceptions that were less habituated and more energized than typically filled their days. The given themes were intended to be as concrete as needed but they could also open up into much wider spaces. The theme, for example, of resistance would be experienced in depressing the piano keys, tuning a drum head, cutting a piece of fruit, cleaning a frying pan, hugging a loved one, accepting criticism, or simply trying to sit down to do this assignment. “Scale” could be taken as an aspect of dimension (e.g., how a tiny motif spins out an entire prelude or symphonic movement) or as a question about the scales used in the music you’re listening to right now. Journal writing will have its own page on the website, but here are a few themes that students found provocative and useful.
Tension, Initiation & Closure, Relationship, Texture, Loudness, Feeling. Thinking, Sensation, Pace, Stride, Speed, Tempo, Memory, Learning, Habit, Originality, Authenticity, Tradition, Innovation, Scale, and many others.
Here’s Matt MacLean’s journal. The quality of impressions like these helps me see the class fresh: new attitudes, new behaviours, new ideas… The generic perception of “student” begins to flesh itself out as that individual student.
