I've been keeping a journal off and on since I was 10. There are periods when I wrote almost every day, like the year of graduate school at UW-Madison. And then there are those where I wrote almost nothing, like the three years I spent at Rockford College in northern Illinois. Sometimes it's a factual record of what I did. At others, it's a rambling on how I felt. I've written screaming rants at God, and I've written love letters to secret crushes. I've self-edited what I've recorded, and I've simply let go and put down things exactly as they were.
I started keeping a practice journal a couple of weeks after getting into a regular practice routine. A couple of presenters at the NFA convention mentioned keeping one, and my friend Jonathan keeps one. Zara Lawler named her blog "The Practice Notebook", and she writes about keeping one here and here. There are probably as many different ways of keeping a practice notebook as there are musicians keeping one.
While writing in my journal I realized that the best place for my practice notebook wasn't in the spiral notebook I bought for it. It needs to be in my journal, part of my record of my everyday life. Just as music is a part of my life. I can think of a vast number of reasons for keeping a separate practice notebook, but putting my practice record in my journal is for me part of the whole process of balancing my life. It's also one of the reasons I started writing this blog.
And in some ways this blog is both journal and practice notebook. I'm still trying to figure out it's "voice."
Right now it's mostly about my ongoing rediscovery of what it means to be a musician and a flutist.
.... and a person.
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