In Experiencing ‘Flow’ in Jazz Performance, a publication from the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series, Elina Hytönen-Ng examines how contemporary jazz musicians emotionally, physically and intellectually connect to performance. In line with the aim of the series to present multidisciplinary approaches to the study of popular music, this monograph applies theories from positive psychology to jazz, an art form that has been widely treated by the field of ethnomusicology. Hytönen-Ng's psychological reading of performance argues that jazz, as an improvisation-based art form, functions in modern urban culture as a potential vehicle for experiencing higher consciousness or what are termed ‘peak experiences’ in psychology. Although this phenomenology of performance de-emphasises common cultural studies themes such as gender, racial politics and globalisation, it allows for a discussion of the values that guide musicians’ professional and creative lives and so provides an alternate reading of musical processes in jazz as presented in definitive studies such as Ingrid Monson's Saying Something (Reference Monson1995), Paul Berliner's Thinking in Jazz (Reference Berliner1994) and Howard Becker's Do You Know …?: The Jazz Repertoire in Action (Reference Becker2009).

Hytönen-Ng's study focuses on Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi's concept of flow, which builds on Abraham Maslow's classic research on peak experiences. Flow is central to positive psychology, a branch of psychology that emerged in the 1990s and which seeks to enable individuals to attain meaningful existences by understanding principles of creative, goal-driven activities. Flow can be experienced as effortlessness in a task, a sense of control, a self-affirming perspective, and ultimately a level of absorption that leads to alternate perceptions of time and heightened physical states. Music, as Csikszentmilhalyi notes, is one of many ‘flow activities’ along with ‘rock climbing, dancing, sailing, chess, and so forth’ that ‘were designed to make optimal experience easier to achieve’ (Csikszentmilhalyi Reference Csikszentmihalyi1990, p. 72). This assertion – that music functions to enable individuals to move beyond ‘ordinary reality’ – is a guiding precept of Hytönen-Ng's study, which examines jazz as a means to optimal experience rather than an element in political, cultural, communicatory, economic and ideological processes.

Although Csikszentmilhalyi identifies flow experiences in all music, Hytönen-Ng limits her study's scope to jazz performance because she argues that, as an art focused on the mastery of improvisation, it allows more freedom than popular or classical music. The assumption that jazz enables a greater connection to flow because of the inherent ‘freedom’ of improvisation is problematic on several fronts. The claim that popular music has less ‘freedom’ because of set harmonic structures ignores the power of invariance in the forms of groove or pocket just as the claim that classical music is restricted by the score ignores the expressive possibilities involved in interpretation.

Hytönen-Ng's methodology for examining flow in jazz involved conducting semi-structured interviews with 18 musicians from Europe, North America and Australia and interpreting these discussions within the frameworks of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and discourse analysis. In using these frameworks, she examines how artists perceive certain events as well as how their articulations of those events bridge their intellectual understandings and emotional experiences. In line with the analytical approaches of IPA, Hytönen-Ng codes patterns of experience across her interviews, from which she extracts a framework of phenomenological perspectives.

The main body chapters of Experiencing Flow are organised around broad interview themes with titles such as ‘Like a Junkie Looking for a Musical Fix’, ‘Always Concentrating on the Music’ and ‘Smallish Intimate Places’. Structurally, this causes some problems, as there are often divergent perspectives among Hytönen-Ng's interviewees about what constitutes ‘flow’. In Chapter 2, ‘The Whole Mystery of Being Human’, Hytönen-Ng examines the connection of spirituality and flow in music, noting that Finnish musicians resisted referencing spirituality (‘There is no need to mysticise the phenomenon in any way’, p. 78), Australian and British musicians generally emphasised intellectual processes over spiritual (‘I'm not cynical towards spiritualism. But we are the creators of our own music’, p. 79), and American musicians drew stronger parallels between flow and religious experiences (‘The other word that does come to mind is “transcendence”’, p. 79). These diverse conceptualisations of experience in jazz complicate discussing flow in concrete terms and lead Hytönen-Ng to generalise about the cultural contexts of the individuals to account for their differences.

The reliance on discussions also presents several challenges: foremost, that ‘flow’ is a highly subjective experience that is not easily articulated. As Hytönen-Ng notes, ‘music and … flow are primarily non-verbal and corporeal, involving a paradox in which something that is communication is required to define something that is beyond communication. Put simply: musical experiences are beyond words’ (p. 61). Hytönen-Ng addresses this problem of treating music experience through the lens of language – what musicologist Charles Seeger identified as the ‘linguocentric predicament’ and grappled with throughout his career – by applying a ‘wide contextual examination of the jazz scene’ and contextualisation of the interviewees’ language. For example, Hytönen-Ng explains the difficulty of broaching the topic of flow as resulting from the ineffability of peak experiences as well as the taboo of discussing these experiences from the perspective of the individual. Her work shows that musicians would often default to other terms such as ‘burning’ and focus on describing the group dynamic. This focus on articulating the communal aspects of flow rather than personal achievement of enlightened experiences demonstrates how musicians balance ego and collectivity.

Hytönen-Ng's methodological focus on interview data would benefit from incorporating musical transcription, visual media analysis and participant observation. This would better ground the subjectivity of flow experiences by providing specific examples of flow that could be explained in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre. It would also benefit the study if there were links to video or audio recordings that were discussed as part of the analysis. It seems a missed opportunity to have musicians only discuss their impression of past experiences rather than including their reactions to their own performances.

Experiencing Flow is not a study of the process of achieving flow in the tradition of David Sudnow's Ways of the Hand (Reference Sudnow1978) and Kenny Werner's Effortless Mastery (Reference Werner1996), although it complements these works by emphasising the experience of performing rather than sound structures or cultural context. This focus could serve music educators at the undergraduate and graduate level in addressing issues of musicianship and collectivity. Many of the themes extracted from the discussions: the relationship of the individual to the group, the impact of audiences and physical spaces on performance, and the role of spirituality in creative approaches, would fuel discussions that could impact performance practice.

Experiencing Flow also contributes to the study of music cognition. Recent studies in this area explore music as a biological phenomenon (Peretz Reference Peretz2006; Simonton Reference Simonton2013) as well as the relationship of experience and meaning in music (Clayton et al. Reference Clayton, Dueck and Leante2013). As a study that explores music through the motivations that drive its creation, Experiencing Flow provides a multidisciplinary work which can inform studies of why we make music.