Thomas Parente’s Positive Pianist Puts Passion Into Practice and Performance

Full disclosure: the book I’m reviewing here is about flow. As such, it has direct relevance to our forthcoming National Conference and Symposium on Flow in Performance. This gathering will give us a forum for exploring a wide variety of ways of understanding what it means for performers to flow— physically, emotionally, cognitively, socially, and holistically. The book’s author, Tom Parente, Dalcroze Licentiate, DSA member, and full-time piano faculty at Rider University’s Princeton campus, Westminster Choir College, was instrumental in helping to make it possible to hold our conference at Rider. This past February, he and I offered a workshop entitled Flow, Learning Theory, and Blues Performance Practice to a dozen or so eager participants to spark interest in the conference and launch Dalcroze Central New Jersey.

From the outset Tom addresses his readers in a personal manner. Recollections of his Italian grandmother’s homespun wisdom on such broad themes as “loving what you do and doing what you love” signal that he does not intend this to be a dry, academic treatise but rather a user-friendly invitation to join him on his wonder-filled journey through the complex theoretical maze he has thoughtfully mapped out. Even when plunging the reader into the intricacies of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, popularized in the latter’s classic work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimum Experience, Tom guides us gently but surely along the winding pathway, ensuring that we don’t get swamped in highly technical backwaters.

Essentially the book reflects Tom’s application of Csikszentmihalyi’s theory to piano practice and performance. Csikszentmihalyi conceives of the learner as moving between two fundamental human needs or impulses, one urging us to seek security, stability, and safety, the other impelling us to seek challenge, risk, and opportunity. Flow, or optimum experience, stems from striking a healthy balance between these two needs. Indulging one to the virtual exclusion of the other will only scuttle the performer’s best efforts, either boring her with excessive control and stability or overwhelming her with excessive uncertainty and volatility. We might envision Csikszentmihalyi’s ideal means of progressing as a rising staircase. Achieving flow entails navigating the dynamic equilibrium between these two extremes, enabling the performer to climb steadily upward toward higher levels of achievement without fully letting go of the confidence-building foundation provided by previously developed skills.

Going beyond Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, Tom adapts it to the specific demands of motor-skills acquisition by incorporating Paul Fitts and Michael Posner’s ideas about the stages of learning. Tom keeps his reader interested in the theory, despite all the technical exposition, by offering a humorous account of his efforts to drive a rented car in England to illustrate the link between the two theories. Some Dalcroze educators might reasonably quibble about Fitts and Posner’s insistence that all learners necessarily move through three stages in the course of learning, from the cognitive, to the associative, to the autonomous. Some modes of Dalcroze Education offer a counter example. But the distinctive manner in which the Dalcroze approach works, first appealing to the student’s intuitive responses to music rather than his conscious mind, in part to promote greater mind-body integration, puts it in a unique pedagogical realm, distinguishing it from much of the intellectual learning Fitts and Posner are looking to theorize. In conversation, Tom has proposed that, using the minimum of explanation at the start of a eurhythmics lesson, the Dalcroze teacher can move students rapidly through the cognitive and associative phases into the autonomous phase, possibly addressing this discrepancy.

Tom gently but persistently urges the budding performer to strive more for self-acceptance than for some unattainable ideal, latter pursuit that risks setting ourselves up for failure. The book offers a powerful alternative to the highly competitive dynamic that drives music education in the conservatory, where emerging artists face the prospect of either being lifted up onto a pedestal in the pantheon of virtuoso performers, or cast down into purgatory for failing to deliver on their talent and defiling the sacred art of music. Resetting the focus on the learning process itself, Tom repeatedly holds up the achievement of flow as an alternative criterion of success. Urging readers to evaluate the degree to which they’ve entered this positive psychological state, he shifts their attention away from the immediate results of their efforts and directs them instead to leverage the dynamic learning process flow engenders in the service of their aesthetic goals. A refreshing contrast to the content-oriented approach prevalent in classrooms across the country, the book fleshes out a highly student-centered vision of teaching.

In fact, it’s so student centered, Tom directs most of his insights to piano students—especially to college piano majors— guiding them in specific, concrete, practical, and possibly even measurable ways, to apply Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory to their work in the piano studio. Given that this is the angle he adopts routinely in his teaching, this approach makes sense. And, no doubt much as his students do, the book benefits from his warm, ingratiating style, making it a highly readable trek through somewhat daunting theoretical terrain. While a student working through this material with a teacher who can assess his or her progress objectively would be ideal, the book is written such that a highly motivated, highly self-directed novice could work through it and benefit from and the wisdom Tom supplies—especially in the chapters devoted to the study of actual repertoire.

As I listened in on the conversation between author and budding pianist, however, it became clear to me that Tom is also indirectly addressing teachers. When I got to the last chapter, I was thrilled to see him turn his gaze to us and explicitly flesh out his humanistic—and humane—vision of teaching, inspired not only by Csikszentmihalyi’s original ideas about actualizing human potential, but also by Abraham Maslow’s and Martin Seligman’s ideas about positive psychology. For us Dalcroze teachers, the book opens up a larger discussion on learning theory—especially sensory-motor theory as it relates to performance—pedagogical methods, and the roles motivation, conscious will, and unconscious drives play in education. I look forward to pursuing these areas, which are so pertinent to our work in the classroom, at the Symposium.

Fellow practitioners who know of Tom’s Dalcrozian roots will find vindication in the book’s last chapter, where he hints at these roots without explicitly identifying them as such. For example, he describes an improvisation game as a vehicle for getting non-pianist keyboard harmony students to confront the physical challenges of playing scales with correct fingerings. He then encourages teachers to harness the power of physical movement to empower their students to play with greater rhythmic understanding and flow. He illustrates this point with the polyrhythmic opening of Debussy’s first Arabesque. I’m hopeful that the Symposium will give him a chance to elaborate on the connections between flow theory and Dalcroze Education that his book leaves to the imagination.

Offering harmonic, contrapuntal, orchestral, and polyrhythmic possibilities not available to most other instruments, the piano figures prominently in the training of Dalcroze teachers. For this reason alone, this book’s intriguing approach to keyboard instruction will prove useful to our members. And because Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory has direct applications to the ways we approach movement challenges in the Dalcroze lesson, the book suggests provocative ways of framing what we’re doing in eurhythmics and solfège classes, and, more crucially, what we’re trying to get students to do.

You should be able to get a signed copy at the conference. I hope you will.