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Ah summer! When the icy tentacles of the semester have receded, melted by the desert sun. Not so fast!

Here at ASU, we have a number of graduate students preparing for the dreaded Comprehensive Exams. Comp Exams within music are designed to demonstrate expertise, understanding, and creativity of thought in one’s discipline.

There is much to say about how doctorates should change to reflect the state of our professional recontextualizing the experience as less of a credential and more a set of skills, taking on notions of professional development explicitly. But, that’s a tirade for the last 55 seconds of a faculty meeting.

So, when it came time to assign some reading for our intrepid and patient DMA percussionists I ventured a little further afield, watching hours of Reading Rainbow, and generally running way off the rails and communing with my book club of one. Since this newsletter is ostensively about learning through details and context, I thought I’d share what’s running those the narrow rivulets of my mind’s river.

Inverted Circles

A few months ago I posited some circles of context we can take on when learning music:

I thought these were helpful markers in relation to learning a specific piece of music, but they work for learning an instrument more generally:

• Mission Critical: details essential to one’s specialization. Information about a piece of music, performance practice, logistics.
• “You Should Know:” a broader circle of information that situate one’s practice in a variety of contexts.
• “Did You Know:” ability to connect ones specialization to a larger history and cultural context. This can from a distance read as trivia, hence the moniker.

Comp exams, written by specialists for specialists, generally take on the first two circles, sprinkling in a some sweat-inducing forays into “did you know” territory.

Fox or Hedgehog?

Archilochus writes that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Substantiated by Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, foxes are generalists, hedgehogs specialists. For those of us in academia, specialization is a powerful tool, both in advancing original research, and in creating metrics to measure that research. Silos are meaningful to us, protecting knowledge from short-term fluctuations while driving innovation in thought, as the advances of scholars in their narrow fields of study scaffold larger ideas which enable new patterns of thought within societies.

However, this narrow band of knowledge can create problems when faced with unfamiliar learning environments.

(Plus, when specialists speak to one another, it can feel like this):

In Range, David Epstein argues that those with the most success in certain fields tend to be generalists, with a broad array of experience from a variety of disciplines. If our goal is to teach musicians to adapt to an ever-changing environment, shouldn’t we train them to be generalists in addition to specialists, to think across disciplines and silos, to create new ideas while also training them to dive deep when required? Can’t we be foxes AND hedgehogs?

Learning

In my music school curriculum, we would endeavor to teach one skill: learning, the most compoundable skill of all, the implicit central thrust of our educational journeys.

Some essential traits of learning are:

• Thinking across disciplines, holding conflicting ideas or worldview in one’s mind while synthesizing new ideas.
• Noticing details in all mediums, analyzing their component parts, and organizing them into larger categories
• Contextualizing ideas within and outside of a number of systems and patterns of thought while drawing connections between ideas
• Intrinsic motivation and curiosity.
• An awareness of the psychology and neuroscience underlying our practice
• Articulation of these ideas without jargon, pretense, or turgidity (basically the opposite of me)

Michel de Montaigne argues that one should have “a well-made than a well-filled head.” These skills contextualize the study of percussion, and I argue that a shrewd percussionist should begin with them. They facilitate repertoire knowledge by positioning music within larger trends while focusing on special moments in works of art. They contextualize the practice of playing within a larger constellation of musical skills, making our practice time more efficient and effective. They make time in the practice room more effective by harnessing concrete ideas about how our bodies and minds work.

The thread that connects subject matter expertise and broad knowledge? Details!

One Circle to Rule Them All

My new circle, inspired by the typical academic bench mark for taxonomies, ice cream sizes at Cold Stone Creamery.

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• Like it (5oz): domain-specific information about percussion. Most fungible, but the most susceptible to dogma. Must read, but also must critique.
• Love It (8oz): writings on music, texts which speak to the historical periods in which the musician wants to inhabit, or the history which informs the present. Texts on professional development. Susceptible to editing and moderately squirmy in thought, but worthwhile.
• Gotta have It (12oz): books that speak across domains, books on learning, history, cultural studies, psychology. Least likely to change, but most dynamic in thought. “Senior liberal arts college students elective” zone. This circle is the most important because it subsumes the others

With that in mind, here’s Part I of my reading list:

Details

​Kohlstedt, Kurt, and Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design​

For years, the 99PI podcast has highlighted the details in our built environment, with Roman Mars’ silky baritone highlighting the intentionality between the myriad “invisible” details in curb cutouts, raccoon-proof trash containers, Euro bills, city flags, oddly sized trains, North Korean architectural proclivities, the sounds phones make. 99PI goes beyond, though, situating these details within larger notions of what our built environment says about who built it.

The 99% Invisible City book takes this focused unfocusedness to cities: exploring the origins and lives of typically anonymous features from fire escapes to drinking fountains. For me, the takeaway is not the specific content, although it’s catnip for me. It’s the way in which Mars and his producer’s work so mirrors great musical analysis. Musicians are in the business of details, noticing and falling in love with tiny moments, seeking to understand and enrich those moments through context and connection-making, and then keeping that detail special while highlighting it in performance (or every day life: I promise you will never look at a trash can the same way ever again). The 99% Invisible City is not about cities: it’s about enthusiasm, and thus is a wonderful manual for those of us working to create frameworks around advocating for our musical passions.

​Moore, Rowan. Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture​

How does our built environment impact our lives? Moore teases apart the ideology of buildings while situating architecture as a barometer of cultural desires and norms. For musicians, how Moore makes his arguments is most valuable: articulating details, drawing connections with larger trends, and focusing on intention and innovation—small to big! The chapter on Japanese garden design is a great place to start.

​Gann, Kyle. Music Downtown​

I love a good monograph, but there is no substitute for the liquidity and velocity of journalistic writing. What better to bridge the gap between tomes and newsprint than this dazzling collection of prescient reviews and portraits from Gann, whose regular missives in the Village Voice tell the story of American experimental music in the 1980s and 1990s. While ostensibly reviews, Gann’s synthesis of visceral depictions of events, polemic-level opinions, and large scale thinking charts a path for what music criticism can be. The reviews are never just reviews, and Gann takes every opportunity to go BIG (ever wonder where my preoccupation with details comes from?)

In particular, “Berlitz’s Downtown for Musicians” was influential to me in negotiating how orally transmitted performance practice is essential to experimental music, as well as showing me one can swear in the newspaper.

​Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice​

Arguing that there’s not much separating “downtown” minimalism from 1970s Disco, Fink argues that music is intrinsically linked to the repetitive industrial techniques, mass-media advertising, and more. Clever and acerbic, Fink’s is a wonderful entry point into how passive cultural norms are embodied in many disciplines, arguing that to understand music, one must understand culture. Repeating Ourselves would be a great companion to Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, which demonstrates how advertising companies appropriated the language of counter-culture

​Born, Georgina. Rationalizing Culture​

Come for the ethnographic observations on IRCAM (institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique, the powerful French sound lab) in the 1980s and 1990s. Stay for the pitch-perfect situation of musical postmodernism as needing modernism, and the parallels between the DIY aesthetics and Downtown music. The twist: the very practitioners of the most elite modernist music were moonlighting as DIY DJs!

​Taruskin, Richard. Oxford History of Western Music​

What would you say to a five volume series about the evolution of western classical music? Yes please! This is more Taruskin’s history than Oxfords, and the famously cantankerous musicology legend Taruskin brings the sass. Don’t let the titles fool you, these are case studies, and T’s “brilliance and delirium” shows (to me, at least) that strong openings and specificity of focus are a powerful way of examining general trends in history. I read this all while on a treadmill at Avaloch Farm Music Institute, so my notes look like the early works of Cy Twombly.

How to Learn

Music teachers are wonderful at describing practice and articulating what constitutes a great performance. Less clear, though, is how we learn. These works have helped break into that black box of learning, clarifying how our brains and bodies acquire new skills and how those practices can be folded into the intuitive study of music.

​Epstein, David. Range​

Epstein challenges the idea that specialization is essential to success, arguing that generalists with a broad array of experience from a variety of domains tend to have more success in "wicked" learning environments. While Epstein does touch specifically on music, I’ve found the most helpful elements of Range to be Epstein’s synthesis of Design Thinking, Deliberate Practice, Deep Work, and cognitive bias, as well as the idea that a wandering career path (so typical of artists) is a valid and valuable one. I’ve already quoted him once in this post, so I must be serious.

To Epstein, music is usually the narrative lynchpin for the cult of the head start: focused work on a repetitive task, minimal deviation, and a kind learning environment. If one starts early enough, the requisite hours of practice can be achieved early enough to have a terrific head start. Classical musicians work primarily on algorithm: articulating a pattern that has worked in the past, applying previously successful techniques to a problem, and repeating. This thinking is effective because in classical music, many of the problems are old; repertoire that is pre-existing or is similar in affect or structure to a previous work. At the same time, classical training has been honed over hundreds of years to create musicians capable of tackling these familiar problems quickly and effectively.

Range’s case studies show that head starts tend to evaporate over time, as the match quality of tortoises overwhelms the narrow skill of hares. While these studies ignore the professional durability of a head start in music (more concerts create more concerts, and it’s challenging to break into a musical community when one is older) I do concur that time spend developing problem-solving, critical thinking is more important than algorithms in creating a durable professional career. Epstein argues that learning is more durable and applicable when it occurs through osmosis rather than error correction, although error correction seems to be how we teach classical music.

​Berg, Christopher. Practicing Music by Design​

Wonderful book combining recommendations on practicing and learning from historic musical virtuosi with scientific ideas about how humans best learn. While Berg lays out 8 central tenets of practicing, his sub-thesis is that artists beat psychologists to this. Practically, I love this book because of how Berg focuses on the details of practicing, positing instrument-agnostic ideas. For me, I found new practice techniques and the ammunition to challenge long-held dogmas. There’s a lot to say here, particularly around what notions of practicing and “good” performance have to say about musical and cultural priorities throughout history, but at the least Berg’s is a worthy tome for those looking for practical advice on practicing.

​Coyle, Daniel. The Talent Code​

Building upon hard science and his own discoveries visiting “talent hotbeds” (zones where density and flexibility of work ignite exponential grown) around the world, Coyle articulates how practice develops myelin, an insulating layer around nerves which facilitate the transmission of electrical impulses. Myelin facilitates more effective execution of complex tasks and its growth is paramount to peak performance in any field (except maybe the study of myelin). His synthesis of epiphany-based learning often found in high-density environments and the long-term growth facilitated by deliberate practice posits a learning style that can come naturally to musicians—a combination of solitary work and socialized growth. It reads like the DaVinci Code

​Ericsson, Anders, and Robert Pool. Peak​

An expert in expertise, Ericsson’s is perhaps the most significant text on the practices that enable expert-level performance. Ericsson lays out a framework for Deliberate Practice, purposeful learning with well-defined, specific goals, and clear targets that require sets of small changes adding up to larger change. Deliberate practice requires, produces, and depends on mental representations, “A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about:” a multi-sensory idea of what something is like when it’s “right.” Deliberate practice rewires our brains to facilitate expertise, and the techniques Ericsson discusses demonstrate that how one learns more important than how long one learns for. Sounds pretty helpful!

​Newport, Cal. Deep Work​

Newport’s work has become an essential element of my pedagogy. I’ve written quite a bit about Deep Work (check it out here), focused, uninterrupted, and productive work on any task which mobiles as much of one’s mental energy as possible, reduces distractions, and enables productivity to compound. Broadly similar to Deliberate Practice—the scientific method applied to skill development—and flow, that thrillingly elusive balance between challenge and skill, Newport posits Deep Work as a way to help tune out the distractions of contemporary life while training your brain to focus more effectively and powerfully. More importantly for my students, Newport is practical and specific, offering systems, practices, and strategies to enable sustained focus. Sounds valuable for those training to focus for a living.

Small and Big

As performers, domain-specific information, that mastery of the patterns, schemes, tropes, and mental representations of one’s field, forms our technical and musical framework. At the same time, the utility of this specific information is tied to contemporary society, and thus ebbs and flows. Twenty years ago, memorizing the Library of Congress category numbers and navigating RILM and RIPM were skills of academic apex predators. My percussion students might not ever use their hard-earned bass drum muffling skills, or construct a mounting system that allows a triangle to resonate freely while maintaining adjacency to a woodblock. They need to adapt.

On the other hand, the constant in our educational journeys is the skill of learning itself. Central to the skill of learning is examining an idea from many angles, honing the ability to create flexible systems of thought, examining ideas from a big-picture perspective (disciplinary thinking) and from the level of details, the scales and arpeggios of our world.

Unfortunately, our silos make it near impossible to teach in this way within a university music curriculum. Maybe some day?

Next time: Let’s Get Nerdier, with “Like It” and “Love It” Circles, encompassing reading on music history, percussion, and professional development.

Happy reading!

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