Seeking Challenge, Finding Skill: Flow Experience and Music Education

he compelling nature of music making engages us as no other human activity. An infant attends to her mother’s melodT ic voice, responding in synchrony with her own vocalizations. A group of elementary school students spend every recess refining the complex rhythms, movement, and chant of a hand-clapping game. Teenagers sequester themselves to the garage for hours, tirelessly striving to make manifest the sounds in their heads. There are no grades or paychecks for these activities; there is something intrinsically rewarding about the doing itself. Music making requires much of us, and we seek out those challenges that invite our best efforts. Developmental psychology provides ontogenetic evidence that challenge-seeking behavior is innate, a biological mechanism to insure that survival skills will be learned. Studies of mastery motivation focus on children’s dispositions for engagement in appropriately challenging activities (McCall 1995). Piaget (1962) studied how children challenge themselves through their symbolic and constructive play, creating contexts in which their understandings can be tested and confirmed. The creative nature of music making draws upon this childhood sense of self as an agent of possibility. The vignettes above demonstrate the diverse nature of musical engagement, which involves physical, social, and cognitive challenges. The multisensory requirements of music demand our full involvement: We simultaneously hear sound, see movement-based and notation-based representations of that sound, and are kinesthetically responsive to what we hear and see as we play instruments, sing, and move. Confirmed by MRI studies that show activation of multiple brain regions during musical performance (Sergent 1993). the physiological perspective provides a view of how music challenges us to be completely attentive with mind and body. A sociological perspective frames music making as communicative-our inherent need to express that which is inexpressible through language. This impulse to make meaning musically begins in the mutually reinforcing vocalizations between mothers and infants, considered to be the origin of intimacy and aesthetic understanding (Dissanayake 2000). In adolescence, association with specific musical subcultures often defines identity. Drawn to the unique intensity available through communication in sound, youth often claim selfhood through musical choices that express alienation from adult culture and fellowship with peers. Professional performers from jazz improvisers to chamber music players have reported the joys of collective meaning making.’ Music challenges us to express and be responsive to personal and cultural meanings. The inherent proclivity for musical experience is also interpretable from a cognitive perspective. Theory supporting research on the “Mozart Effect” suggests that the relationship between temporal qualities and spatial patterns in music provides an accessible and CNcia1 opportunity for the brain to exercise (and thereby reinforce) its neuronal connections (Rauscher and Shaw 1998). Alluding to the human propensity for generating structure, Gardner (1 997) hypothesized that what makes music intelligence “special” may be its function as a primary organizer of cognition. Music challenges us perceptually to organize sound in time. Musical engagement both emanates from and resonates with these multiple representations of challenge. The search for an appropriate paradigm that could explain this multifaceted, compelling nature of music making led to the work of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1 990, 1993, 1997a) and colleagues (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi 1988). Their construct of flow experience, a state of optimal enjoyment defined by the individual’s perception of high skill and high challenge for a given activity, provides both the requisite theoretical insight and methodolog-