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I was perusing Hervé This’s Molecular Gastronomy, and confronted by yet another similarity between cooking and music: the annoyance of some technique working but not knowing why. This leads over time to rigid adherence to dogma. We end up with a metal spoon in a bottle of champagne to keep the bubbles going, refusing anything but a steep copper pot to cook polenta, and never deviating from the same musical warmup.

What if we devoted some time to understanding why and how our learning works? So, in the spirit of learning about why something works, I wanted to share a recent article I penned for Percussive Notes, the journal/magazine of the Percussive Arts Society. Tasked with writing something for their Professional Development section, I decided to write about the utility of professionalizing ones musical learning, of creating a deliberate and comprehensive creative practice around musical learning.

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I wanted to share best practices from a number of disciplines. So, I decided to draw a little slur between “practice room” tips and “professional development” tips. Why? Musicians and creatives today have unprecedented opportunities to develop their skills through easily accessible recordings, digital resources, and direct work with master teachers worldwide. Research in cognitive neurology and performance psychology has revealed powerful strategies for effective learning and performing under pressure. While professional development activities are now common in music curricula, resources connecting professional habits in the practice room to career success remain limited.

My main thesis is that the most potent professional development tool for performing musicians is to become a more effective musical learner. First, I argue that a critical component of professionalism is maximizing efficiency and effectiveness within the practice room through the development and deployment of virtuosic diagnostic ability, aggressive refinement, dynamic organization, and the proactive pursuit of performance without stage fright. When performers commit to the mastery of these skills, they can produce impactful interpretations more reliably and in less time. As a result, a masterful practicer has more time to address the administrative obligations that form a significant part of modern musical professions, or more time to look at art, cook, or otherwise take inspiration from the world around them.

I share ideas and best practices from scientific research and artistic experience around three key theses:

1. Organizing musical practice around how our brains and nervous systems encode, consolidate and retrieve information is central to effective learning.
2. The habits that enable peak performance under pressure are developed through practice and study and are refined through feedback.
3. Planning learning around when, where, and how one learns most effectively is essential.

Second, I share some thoughts for how the skills underpinning peak performance might transfer to professional development activities outside the practice room, asserting that the two domains are mutually reinforcing. The habits of learning are foundational professional skills: instantaneous diagnostic ability supported by rich mental representations, rigorous refinement of a task through deliberate practice, and using data about how one learns to set goals and manage time are supremely transferable to any discipline.

The entire article is available here if you’re interested.

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Top Tips

Here’s the Tl:DR takeaways, some of the top tips that emerge from a multiplicity of sources. Maybe they apply to your discipline?

• Focusing practice on developing rich mental models provides the highest return on investment in musical development.
• Learning is most durable and flexible when it is most difficult
• Work outside the practice room is essential to effective work inside the practice room
• Separating technical development from repertoire study gets both accomplished faster.
• Peak performance under pressure is supported by frequent feedback and astute response to it
• The importance of generative memory and reflection to solidifying and recalling memories
• Using design thinking to organize learning effectively is key!

Is there a learning technique or source I’m leaving out? Please let me know!

The entire issue has some real page turners, including an update on the 100th anniversary of the Moeller book, a seminal drumming text whose codex of drumming rhythms was caught in an editorial whirlpool.

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Happy reading!

Other things I’m liking:

• Another entry in our niche competition field: The World Championship Massage Final:

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• ​This fun map of the Grandes Randonnées, the French national hiking path system. I have NO idea how the numbering system works.

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