The Aha! List
While I was a student at the Schleswig Holstein Music Festival in Germany, I befriended two violists from the ACHT studio at Juilliard. At the time, this collaborative viola studio included Misha Amory, Heidi Castleman, Hsin-Yun Huang and Steven Tenenbom (the first initials of their last names making the acronym ACHT). I had heard a lot about Heidi Castleman's teaching in particular, and I peppered my new friends with questions about her pedagogy. Not long into that discussion, they revealed to me the three-ring binder that Castleman gives to all her students. The binder was stuffed to the gills with exercises, etudes and journal articles, organized by tabs for practicing, left hand, right hand, rhythm, intonation, scale routines, and much, much more. It was a treasure trove of information, and I knew I had to get one of my own!
When I returned home, I reached out to a friend in the San Diego Symphony that had also been a Castleman student and asked him if I could borrow his binder. He was kind enough to loan me his, and I spent a few hours making my own copy.
As I made my way through the materials, one of the items in the binder was a template for a daily practice journal. I had seen a number of practice journal formats, but one section of this template stuck out to me: there was a place for "Ahas!" (amusingly, the next category was "Ughs!"). While much of my practice during my 20's felt like a grind, every once and a while I would have an "Aha" moment - a sudden realization about how to make sound, or how my left hand functioned, or something about the nature of the music I was playing. At these moments, many little improvements seemed to click together into an easy to understand whole. My usual reaction to these Ahas! was "oh, that's cool!" I would practice for a week or so with that "Aha" at the front of my mind and then forget about it.
Over time, I noticed that I was having the same "Aha" moments over and over! Every 6-9 months, I would realize (again!) that a particular practice method seemed to work well for me, or that by holding the instrument in a certain way I was slightly more comfortable. If I was having the same realizations over and over, it meant I wasn't really incorporating these ideas as well as I could into my playing, and by extension wasn't improving as quickly as I could. This was frustrating, and I knew there had to be a better way!
Fast forward to the beginning of the pandemic. After participating in Jason Haaheim's Deliberate Practice Seminar I started taking more notes during my practice sessions. After a while, I realized that with all the information I was writing down there was no way that I could remember all of it. But what if I had a list of the MOST HELPFUL observations that I had made, and kept those in their own document that I reviewed from time to time? Thus the "Aha! List" was born.
Now, whenever I'm practicing and have an observation that seems valuable, I write it in my practice journal for the day (I use Evernote). At the end of the week, I take the ideas from the week that seem particularly helpful and copy them over to my "Aha! List." When I'm jotting things down during practice, some thoughts are half-formed or unclear, so often before I move an idea over to the list I'll edit it for clarity and flesh out the details more fully. Every once in a while I'll go through the whole list, removing things if I feel like they're fully incorporated into my playing, or if I just don't think they're that important anymore.
There is an ebb and flow to how often I'm adding to the list! Some weeks, no ideas make it over, other weeks I might have one or two ideas. I began my list in September of 2020, and now it's about 5 printed pages long - short enough that I can skim through it in a few minutes and regularly remind myself of the ideas in my playing that I think are most important. This ensures these ideas are top of mind and a part of my daily practice. More importantly, I'm no longer stuck in a loop of rediscovering the same ideas - instead I can build upon them over time.
Finally, I can't stress how helpful it is to have your own most important observations IN YOUR OWN WORDS. Your understanding of how anything in music or the instrument works is likely different than your teacher's or your colleagues. By writing down an idea in the way YOU UNDERSTAND IT, the concept becomes easier for you to access and manipulate. Taking time during a practice session to write down your observations can feel like a waste of good practice time, but getting these ideas out allow you to examine them more closely, and creates the space for you to concentrate on what your working on next so that the idea doesn't continue to bounce around in your head.
I encourage you to start your own "Aha! List"! Let me know in the comments if you do something like this already, or how you keep track of and organize your observations on your playing.