The cognitively flexible pianist

There’s more than one way to play a piece. There’s more than one way to interpret a phrase. There’s more than one way to shape a musical line. For interpretive artists such as pianists, the notes and the composer’s markings give us the sound universe and the broad brushstrokes of the pieces we play. Our job is to fill in the rest. Much like Shakespearean actors, we “speak” the notes of beloved musical classics in our own voices. We shape things with our own experiences, and in our hands the music leaps from the piano in familiar yet utterly unique ways.

When I was a young pianist, I believed there were two ways to play a piece—the right way and the wrong way. It wasn’t until I got to university that I began to enter into dialogue with my professor over how to shape musical lines. “Convince me,” he instructed, when my ideas differed from his own. Freed from the need to mimic him, his direction gave me the enthusiasm to dig deeply into what I was playing. Sometimes I convinced him; most of the time my closer analysis of the music convinced me that he’d been correct. Both results nurtured my budding artistic freedom, assuring me that my job as a pianist was engagement with the music, not mindless mimicry of someone else’s performance of it.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I grew to an even deeper understanding of artistic choices, namely that both interpretations can be the right ones, and that even more choices existed if I opened my mind and my ears to them. One didn’t need to be wrong and another right. In this wonderland of possibility I felt the freedom of knowing that while piano keys may be black and white, my thinking didn’t need to be.

What I’d learned through music study was cognitive flexibility, although I didn’t yet know the term for it. My experience isn’t unique. A recent study showed (unsurprisingly) that children who had received music training showed evidence of enhanced cognitive flexibility, enabling them to switch more quickly between tasks while requiring less cognitive effort than those children without musical training. This is, of course, a wonderful argument for early childhood music education, but it’s also a confirmation of what many musicians have experienced in their own lives—even when they begin musical training later in life.

Playing the piano requires the brain to do multiple tasks all at once. It has to interpret what it sees on the page, send the correct signals to the hands and the body, and keep steady time, all while maintaining an awareness of the structure of the piece, the notes we’re currently playing, the notes we’ve already played, and the notes we’ll be playing in the future—not to mention our emotional responses to the music, and the creative ideas we explore in the score. Every time we play we’re forced to keep multiple possibilities open to us simultaneously. Is it any wonder that the complex task of playing the piano enhances cognitive flexibility?

Once learned, cognitive flexibility spills over into all parts of our lives. This is something I know intimately, having been raised in a rigid religious community where I had virtually no access to outside opinions. My experience, which I wrote about in Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, and Resilience, convinced me that my musical training taught me to think, and once I learned to think, to move beyond the black-and-white thinking of my upbringing. It also taught me the dangers that lurk in rigid binary positions, all-or-nothing statements, and anyone or anything requiring people to embrace one way of thinking while condemning everyone and everything else.

In a society becoming less capable of hearing opposing opinions, a world where violence all too often becomes the preferred way to end a disagreement, we need more cognitively flexible thinkers. As musicians, this is our time, if we choose to embrace it. We, along with people trained in other forms of flexible thinking, can be the quiet voices who remind society that the world is rarely “this or that” but rather “this and that.” We know how to do this. We do it every day at the piano. We know how to hold opposing ideas in our minds without labeling one right and the other wrong. We know how to find creative tension in the place where both are right and both are wrong. We know this because it’s ingrained in the way we make our art.

This flexibility is the opposite of rigid thinking. One of the many things I learned from being raised in a fundamentalist ideology is that the ideals that spring from rigid thinking are rooted in fear. And when we think rigidly, our brains lack the ability to suspend judgment and listen to differing arguments. When we’re afraid, the opposing idea isn’t just wrong, it’s evil. It’s a threat that must be labeled, condemned, and eradicated. Fear cements our opinions, allowing for no dialogue, fueling vicious lashing out against the “other.” And our society becomes just a little more fractured and angry.

This can be changed, but it requires leadership from those who have been trained in cognitive flexibility. It requires all of us to stop our own habitual responses, examine the roots of our own anger, and to listen deeply to those who hold differing opinions. It doesn’t mean that we lack passionate convictions; it means that within those convictions we have the ability to entertain other ideas, to stop dismissing the message because we don’t like the messenger, and to learn to see the humanity behind the rhetoric. It means that we never stop reminding ourselves of this essential truth:

“I could be wrong.”

Whether it be an opinion about a musical interpretation or a political or religious belief, it is critical to keep this sentence in mind. I could be wrong. None of us is infallible. As musicians we can offer the world music that allows people to drop their defenses and access our shared humanity. And as cognitively flexible thinkers we can refuse to let our ideals become rigid and angry. We can refuse to hate. We can refuse to blame. We can refuse to settle for easy answers and dismissive labels. We can choose civil discourse over uncivil discord. We can agree to disagree without being disagreeable. And perhaps, with cognitive flexibility and compassion we can stop building self-righteous word weapons and start building bridges. This is our gentle gift and our task in a world that has stopped listening.

Photo by Pavel Kalenik, courtesy of UpSplash