THE CONCEPT OF “FLOW” IN BRASS PEDAGOGY: ITS HISTORY AND INTERRELATIONSHIP WITH THE THEORIES OF MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI BY BRETT STEMPLE Submitted to the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree, Doctor of Music, Indiana University May 2018 Accepted by the faculty of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Music Doctoral Committee ______________________________________ Barbara Dennis, Research Director ______________________________________ Daniel Perantoni, Chair ______________________________________ Carl Lenthe ______________________________________ John Rommel April 12, 2018 ii Copyright © 2018 Brett Stemple iii For Jackie and Jack, the embodiment of flow, and our first Doctors. iv Acknowledgements Thank you Jisu, Minjoo, Haeun and Yohan, for being the grace that found me. Thank you Derek, René, and Alicia, for being my first heroes. I am immensely grateful for the patience and perseverance of my Doctoral Committee: Professors Carl Lenthe, and John Rommel, whose support and encouragement has been steadfast throughout the extended odyssey that has been my Doctor of Music degree program; a special thanks to my Research Director, Professor Barbara Dennis, who inspired the design and execution of the flow- study research, who was an invaluable advisor and motivational resource throughout the entire writing process, and who encouraged me to keep going, when others might have counselled otherwise; and finally to Provost Professor, Daniel Perantoni, who is the kind of artist-teacher, mentor, and friend that you only hear about in dreams. My aspiration as a professional musician and as a teacher of music is to exemplify the kind of musical and pedagogical-flow that “Mr. P” has demonstrated through his artistry, his passion for pedagogy, and his humanity throughout the half-century of miraculous teaching. I am fortunate to have had Professor Xian Guang Han, Mr. Mark Gould, and Professor Ingemar Roos, participate in my flow-pedagogy interview-study, in addition to Professor Perantoni. Their collective wisdom, musicianship, and passion for the art of music education could fill volumes. They are a capital Q in my first venture into qualitative research, and I am utterly grateful for their invaluable contribution to this project. Finally, I am blessed to be employed by an institutional community as dynamic, supportive and forward-looking as the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, of the National University of Singapore. I am constantly inspired by the faculty, staff, and most of all, by the extremely talented v and vibrant student-body. A special thanks to Professor Bernard Lanskey, Dean of the Conservatory, whose example, mentorship, and support have been instrumental in my development as a pedagogue, administrator and performing-researcher. vi Preface The Master leads by emptying people's minds and filling their cores, by weakening their ambition and toughening their resolve. He helps people lose everything they know, everything they desire, and creates confusion in those who think that they know. Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place. —Lao Tze In music, so often a teacher makes the mistake of altering the machine activity rather than altering what he wants accomplished. The instructor is giving machine methods on how to do it, but people don’t work that way. None of us can. It is so simple. If you want a big breath, Just take in a lot of air. If you want to blow, just blow. A teacher should always try for the simple answers that bring about the proper motor response. That idea belongs not in the realm of anatomy, but in the realm of psychology. —Arnold Jacobs vii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... v Preface. ..................................................................................................................................... vii Table of Contents .....................................................................................................................viii List of Examples ........................................................................................................................ ix List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. x List of Appendices ..................................................................................................................... xi Chapter 1: Traditional Applications of Flow in Brass Pedagogy vis-à-vis Psychological Flow ..... 1 Chapter 2: Historiography of Brass Pedagogy as it Applies to Concepts of Pedagogical Flow .... 16 Chapter 3: Aspects of Flow in Brass Pedagogy: The Interview Study......................................... 84 Chapter 4: Flow in Brass Pedagogy: Data Analysis and Interpretation ....................................... 94 Chapter 5: Epilogue: Brass Flow-Pedagogy, Applications and Conclusions ............................. 130 Appendix A: Protocol for Interview Session I .......................................................................... 133 Appendix B: Protocol for Interview Session II ......................................................................... 135 Appendix C: Interview-Study: Coding Data-Cloud .................................................................. 137 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 138 viii List of Examples Example 1: Cornett and Violin Clefs ......................................................................................... 24 Example 2: Trombone and Bassoon Clefs.................................................................................. 25 ix List of Figures Figure 1: Trombones, cornetts, and trumpets in Syntagma Musicum II ....................................... 22 Figure 2: Woodcut by Hans Burgkmair from the Triumphzug des Kaisers Maximilian I (1516) . 30 Figure 3: Bendinelli’s Trumpet Figure 4: Woodcut Portrait of Girolamo Fantini (1636) ........... 35 Figure 5: Cornetts and trombones in a polychoral performance .................................................. 41 Figure 6: Natural horn in F, by Johann Carl Kodisch, Imperial City of Nürnberg, 1684. ............. 43 Figure 7: Portrait of Gottfried Reiche by Elias Gottlieb Haussmann (1723) ................................ 44 Figure 8: Copperplate image: Giovanni Punto (1782) ................................................................ 48 Figure 9: Portrait of Anton Weidinger ....................................................................................... 54 Figure 10: Keyed-trumpet in G with crooks ............................................................................... 54 Figure 11: Types of nineteenth-century embellishments from a brass-pedagogy perspective. ..... 66 x List of Appendices Appendix A: Protocol for Interview Session I .......................................................................... 133 Appendix B: Protocol for Interview Session II ......................................................................... 135 Appendix C: Interview-Study: Coding Data Cloud .................................................................. 137 xi Chapter 1: Traditional Applications of Flow in Brass Pedagogy vis-à-vis Psychological Flow Throughout the history of brass pedagogy, the concept of flow has played an important role in the development of three central aspects of brass artistry: a musical, lyrical approach to phrasing; an unencumbered flowing approach to brass-instrument technique; and the efficient use of instrumental breathing, i.e. the flow of the breath as a central component of sound production. Since 1990, when the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlined the concept “flow” as an optimal state of mind, “in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity,” in his book by the same name, Flow1, it has also become an important idea in the field of psychology, including educational psychology, sports psychology, and psychology related to performance-studies including instrumental pedagogy. Whilst pursuing my graduate studies in tuba performance and pedagogy at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, and after reading Csikszentmihalyi’s influential work, I began thinking extensively about not only how psychological-flow is essential to optimal musical performance, but also about how great brass pedagogues might intuitively (or explicitly) apply psychological-flow concepts to dimensions of their pedagogical approach in one-to-one studio teaching. With hindsight, I can see that in my own education as a brass musician, some of my most transformative leaps of progress happened during epiphanal moments in one-to-one studio lessons; moments in which I was so immersed and focused on my teacher’s pedagogical directive, that a previously artificial, analytical, self-consciousness approach to brass playing 1 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Steps Towards Enhancing The Quality of Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), Kindle Location 130, Kindle. 1 (inherent with many student-musicians) was, often without my full awareness, being supplanted with a more natural, more intuitive, and more positively unconscious methodology,