President’s Message

Every other year, our National Conference gives us a singular opportunity to advance the Dalcroze Society of America’s three-fold mission: to build and strengthen the community of Dalcroze practitioners; to sustain, advance, and grow the practice of Dalcroze Education in the USA; and, to increase general awareness and appreciation of Dalcroze Education throughout the United States. And so, during five days this summer, we’re hosting a gathering of roughly a hundred attendees, including over fifty scholars, teachers, artists, theorists, and practitioners, offering classes, workshops, panel discussions, and presentations in a wide variety of formats. From June 20 to June 24, Westminster Choir College, Rider University’s Princeton, New Jersey campus, will be abuzz with the active participation of our membership and guests, fully engaged in an exploration of Flow in Performance. Simply by attending such a critical event in the life of our practice, each of us helps to advance this shared project. I hope to see you there.

But it’s not just about making a contribution, as valuable as that is. In its innovative design and implementation, we’ve sought to make this collegial gathering especially useful and especially relevant to you, too. If you need to recharge your professional batteries, if you need to renew your love for teaching and learning, or if you need to reignite your passion for music, movement, improvisation, exploration—and all things Dalcroze—then you need to be here with us!

The conference theme, Flow in Performance: Theories/Practices, has sparked a lot of interest. What’s it all about? The word flow conjures up many different images and ideas. Used in reference to psychological states, it has become associated with the work of Michael Csikszentmihalyi, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. While it’s possible to pronounce his Hungarian name by saying the words “chick sent me higher” with a Brooklyn accent, I’ll refer to him as “MC Flow.” Over twenty-five years ago, his groundbreaking research into positive psychology gained widespread recognition with the publication of his research findings in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990).¹ His model of flow as a state of mind—or, really, of being—has been so influential, several people have asked if that’s what the conference is about. And certainly it will figure prominently.

But we’re flinging the doors wide open and welcoming a wide variety of interpretations of flow, of which there are several. Rudolf von Laban’s Effort-Action Theory,² for example, a key element of Laban Movement Analysis, will also come into play, specifically in reference to the physical enactment of flow and the kinesthetic inner modeling it requires. To help us understand the role of muscular tension in facilitating or impeding movement, Laban contrasted “free” flow with the seemingly paradoxical “bound” flow.

In light of its critical role in mind-body integration, flow can even take on a metaphysical aspect. With regard to the martial arts, for example, I’m intrigued by some of the observations actor Bruce Lee made about the kung fu fighter’s inner attitude. His advice to “be like water”³ has been taken up by time management guru David Allen of Getting Things Done renown. These and other enigmatic remarks have as their source the deep wellspring of Eastern thought on flow, such as the writings of early zen master Eihei Dogen.⁴

In the Western philosophical tradition we can find references to flow in the writings of Heraclitus (c. 535 – c. 475 BCE), whose notion of panta rhei [πάντα ῥεῖ], or “everything flows,” reveals the relationship flow has to time, change, and rhythm. The diversity of these and related sources of flow demonstrates that human beings have been fascinated with it in its many dimensions, but especially as it relates to intuition, perception, thinking, feeling, will, action, and performance, across a wide range of time periods and cultures. In relation to the conference theme, our specific purpose is really to further the teaching and learning of music, dance, mime, acting, storytelling, and other performing arts, as well as other areas, such as sports and martial arts, areas where flow is critical to good performance, by shedding light on the hidden assumptions that lie behind—and the unspoken principles that engender—flow, in all of its diverse manifestations.

All of which figures in what we do as Dalcroze educators, and, perhaps even more so in how we do it. I think we would all agree that to fully experience eurhythmics is to flow. But for the fact that some of the musical qualities we encounter and express in movement entail a disruption of flow in the conventional sense—imagine performing a series of tightly wound staccato gestures—we might even consider flow and rhythm virtually synonymous. From the standpoint of process, the word flow brings to mind the dynamic, student-oriented exploratory realm Dalcroze students and teachers enter when they are learning in and through music. To me it also suggests the mindbody (re)integrating benefits of Dalcroze’s pedagogical methods, which have the capacity to stimulate students’ intuitive control over their actions before they are consciously aware of the factors to which they are reacting. As Jaques-Dalcroze himself identified it, a-rhythmy, the opposite of eu-rhythmy, entails a choppy stuttering mind-body rhythm, an inner turbulence resulting from a dis-integrated mind-body. Given the central role improvisation plays in our interactions with one another, and the way it leverages our innate capacity for emergent design, flow can take on a near spiritual aspect with us, at times.

By way of illustration, let’s take the clever title of Thelonious Sphere Monk’s wryly witty composition “Rhythm-A-Ning.” I believe this neologism solves an intriguing problem we Dalcrozians have with regard to flow. Have you ever tried to identify what we do and what happens in a eurhythmics class using a single verb? “I’m ‘eurhythmicking!’” said no-one ever in describing his or her actions in a Dalcroze class (although its closeness to the word “eureka” lends it a certain charm). This problem is related to one Christopher Small poses in his book Musicking.⁵ The entire book elaborates on the premise that, essentially, the phenomenon we refer to as music does not exist as a thing, per se, in the same way something in the physical realm exists as a thing—that is, as a static, typically solid, object. Of course, using music notation or even audio recording, you can catch the flow of events we experience as music midflight and pin it down, as one might a butterfly, reducing it to specimen of sorts. Musicologists do so all the time when they transcribe an improviser’s fleeting solo. But, while we also use the term music to refer to a written or printed page of sheet music—as in, “did you bring the ‘music’?,” we actually encounter music in its living, vital form as vibrations emanating from a voice or instrument in real time, the resulting sounds and meanings emerging as a dynamic human interactive process that leaves ephemeral traces on our senses and souls, much the way a scent lingers, evoking past lives. Although we routinely, and carelessly, refer to it with the noun music, according to Small, in order to honor its very intangibility, we should really refer to the experience as ‘musicking’.

I see his point. A metaphor for human mortality, the impression of sounds dying away almost as soon as they are born resonates with a provocative idea that the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus framed with the famous statement: “You can’t step into the same river twice.” Influenced by zen philosopher Eihei Dogen’s masterpiece Sho¯bo¯genzo¯, British expatriot philosopher Alan Watts put forward a similar thought centuries later: namely that, all things being ever in flux, we may understand everything—or rather, each thing—not so much as a noun but rather as a verb. According to this line of thinking, there are neither such things as a river, nor a human, nor a piece of music—a res facta—but rather we’re experiencing a “rivering,” a “humaning,” a “musiciking.” Are you the same person you were last year, or last month, or last week, or yesterday, or an hour ago, or even a minute ago? Echoing this sentiment, Bill Evans once said something to the effect that jazz is not a what, but a how. To experience the transformative potential of a Dalcroze class is to realize, indeed, to actualize the volatility of being human, or rather, of human becoming. These ways of relating to the world speak to the dynamic character of time, of moving through time, and, of flow.

Each of these tangential lines of thinking therefore touches upon the guiding theme of our conference. Circling back to our zen-like jazz composer Monk, if rhythm is the quintessential process, the mother-of-all-processes, then what does it mean to identify our experience of this process with a noun, as if it were a stable thing, or a steady state? Insofar as we embody flow when we are being rhythmic or enacting rhythm, or…rhythm-a-ning, as Monk might quip, we are ever emerging anew from that dynamic process. The architectonic sources of music’s predictability and structure— the repetition, restatement, reiteration, and reinforcement of musical ideas—may at times lull us into the impression that there’s some kind of “there” there, when in fact all that’s left of our experience of this elusive phenomenon is its resonance playing across our bodies, minds, and souls. Set in vibration, we become the instrument. Given that some of these vibrations continue to echo in our being years after we had them, and I’m thinking specifically of past Dalcroze National Conferences I’ve attended, you can see how our conference on flow might engender such ruminations.

All well and good in theory; but how might these ideas play out in practice? Let’s start with an ordinary tennis ball, fresh out of the tube, ripe with springy energy.

In fact, take one from the gym bag over there in the middle of the room and hold it in your hand. Go ahead, bounce it on the floor (you know you want to). Who among us hasn’t done this sometime in a eurhythmics lesson?

Now, as the ball turns earthward from the apex of its bounce, reach out and arrest its descent. In the time it has taken to apprehend this object in motion, you’ve marked one complete cycle.

Perform this action several times—bounce, catch, and bounce it and catch it, etcetera, always stopping its movement at the same height—and you generate a steady regular pulse.

resulting from the ball’s rising and falling. Down and up, and down and up…

So far this is Dalcroze 101. We’re embodying rhythm now, activating it in the timespace- energy continuum. And as we all know, when you change the force you’re putting into each bounce, the oscillator changes size and frequency, or tempo. What better way to discover music’s essentially fluid, dynamic character? Concrete experience made liquid.

Now bear with me a minute and consider the physics of the modern tennis ball. To leverage the potential energy inherent in its materials and structure, the particular curve that gives this deceptively simple object its definitive design just happens to function as the intersection of two offset elliptic cylinders, or a hypar (that is, as the intersection of a sphere and hyperbolic paraboloid. Go figure!

Actually, I mention this fact not because I have any real grasp of what it means mathematically. Nor would this news have helped my approach shot back when I was playing the game. Still, I wanted to take a moment to marvel over the ways some highly sophisticated abstract thinking went into the making of this unassuming article from everyday life. Kind of the way a well-wrought eurhythmics class conceals the deep, life-long preparation that went into its innocent revelations of music’s subtle complexities. How many common items, plucked from the flow of events like a ball caught midflight, harbor such intriguing mysteries, I wonder. But perhaps I digress…

Let’s go back to the compact yellow orb itself. Turn it a particular way and notice what happens to the seam that divides it into two regions. Does this point of view remind you of the sinusoidal line that separates “yin” from “yang” in the Chinese Taijitu symbol? Emile Jaques-Dalcroze adopted this very symbol as the “logo” for his practice. What did it suggest to him? The “good flow” eurhythmics promotes? Or something more elusive about the nature of rhythm as it relates to life? For example, the way the symbol itself effectively maps out the earth’s seasonal oscillations in relation to the sun?

One of the first books to broach the topic of flow specifically with regard to human performance was W. Timothy Gallwey’s fascinating little book The Inner Game of Tennis.⁶ Here’s what he wrote: “The [tennis] player seems to be immersed in a flow of action which requires his energy, yet results in greater power and accuracy.”⁷ The book made such an impression on me when I first read it in 1987, I even took up the “outer” game of tennis, the better to probe Gallwey’s treatise on getting out of one’s own way, and to get a handle on its deeper meanings. The book’s Zen-and-the-Artof- Archery-like wisdom appealed to my love of Eastern metaphysics and mysticism. And in line with its not-so-subtle Taoist overtones, its emphasis on “doing by not doing” by disarming the critical, verbally constructed consciousness so the intuitive self can guide the body subliminally to its proper action, each chapter begins with a photograph of a tennis ball, the seam-line playfully hinting at the fluid yin-yang boundary between dark and light, work and play, theory and practice, mind and body, and other mutually dependent opposites we rely on to give rise to conscious thought and verbal meaning. Working with bassist Barry Green, Gallwey later applied the ideas he exposed in The Inner Game of Tennis (1974) to music.⁸

I’m glad to have a chance to bounce these ideas around with you in anticipation of the Symposium that will take place on Monday and Tuesday, June 20 and 21, where we will explore flow from the many different points of view that scholars exploring human performance are opening up. Coming from as near as Princeton and as far afield as the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice, Poland, theorists and practitioners working in as wide a range of fields will share their recent work. The roundtable format will enable in-depth discussion of such areas as:

• Csikszentmihalyi’s Model of Flow Explored, Expanded, and Extended
• Flow in Improvisation: Embodied Cognition in Cross-Cultural Contexts
• Shared Flow: Somatic and Holistic Experiences
• Temporal Processes in Musical Performance: Notated Works/Movement Realizations.

While the Symposium includes some experiential sessions for participants, interspersed among a preponderance of panel discussions and scholarly presentations, as you would expect, the Conference on Wednesday – Friday June 22 – 24 features hands on practical sessions on various and sundry facets of Dalcroze Education. Participants will experience Dalcroze eurhythmics, improvisation, solfège, and pedagogical methods, and a generous sampling of sessions devoted to special applications of Dalcroze’s innovative philosophy and practice. Running beneath the remarkable diversity of these offerings, the conference theme, Flow in Performance, courses like an underground spring, bringing vital energy to the connections we will make or renew, with our beloved practice, with our passion for music, movement, improvisation, and discovery, and with one another. I look forward to rhythm-a-ning with you there.

PS The reference to the Monk tune is also meant to foreshadow the jam session we’re planning for Thursday night, June 23 during the banquet. All improvisers will be welcome to bring their “axes” and “tell their little story” (as Lester Young liked to say). We’ll make “charts” of the tunes on the play list available via the DSA website, so stay tuned—literally.