Book Review: Finding the Self Between the Keys

Title: Inner Harmony: Personal Exploration at the Piano

Author: Matthew Giobbi, Ph.D.

Publisher: Zürichsee Press / Createspace

Genre: Music Psychology / Existential-Phenomenology / Self-Help

Most piano guidebooks are rigidly focused on the mechanical: curl your fingers, keep your wrists loose, master your scales, and drill the metronome until your rhythm is flawless. But in Inner Harmony: Personal Exploration at the Piano, psychologist and musician Dr. Matthew Giobbi flips the script. He asks a much deeper question: What happens to your internal world when you sit down at the keys?

Clocking in at under 100 pages, this slim but dense guidebook acts less like a traditional music instructor and more like a psychological companion. Drawing deeply on existential-phenomenological psychology—a school of thought that focuses on the lived, subjective experience of human beings—Giobbi invites readers to view the piano not as an external object to be mastered, but as a mirror for the psychical self.

The Philosophy: Music as Existential Therapy

Giobbi’s unique background perfectly positions him to bridge this gap. As a professor of psychology at Rutgers University and a trained conservatory musician, he understands both the clinical mind and the creative soul.

Instead of treating piano practice as a chore or a performance to be judged, Inner Harmony frames it as a space for self-exploration and mindfulness. The book gently guides the reader through their own inner landscape, providing a methodology for pulling raw, authentic emotion out of the subconscious and translating it into sound.

Key themes explored in the text include:

• The Lived Experience of Sound: Moving away from the abstract theory of sheet music to focus on how playing actually feels in the moment.

• Improvisation as Self-Knowledge: Using the keys to discover deep-seated psychological spaces that words can't quite reach.

• Dismantling Performance Anxiety: Reframing the piano as a private sanctuary rather than a stage for perfectionism.

Tone and Accessibility

Despite the heavy academic roots in existentialism and phenomenology, Giobbi keeps the tone grounded and accessible. He writes with the patience of a teacher who specializes in helping adults play for pure pleasure. He doesn’t lecture; he accompanies.

The book is structured to lead the reader step-by-step through a journey of creative liberation. It functions well for two distinct audiences:

1. The Classical Lapsed Pianist: Those who walked away from the piano due to burnout or the stress of rigid training, helping them rediscover the instrument on their own emotional terms.

2. The Mindful Beginner: Intrepid adult learners who want to use the piano as a therapeutic, meditative practice rather than a competitive pursuit.

Verdict

Inner Harmony is a gentle, thoughtful antidote to the high-stress, perfection-driven world of traditional music pedagogy. Dr. Matthew Giobbi successfully argues that the goal of playing music shouldn't just be about creating a flawless external melody, but about achieving a resonant internal peace.

If you are looking for a book on advanced music theory or standard finger exercises, look elsewhere. But if you want to understand how the act of pushing down a piano key can become a profound act of self-discovery, Inner Harmony is an essential addition to your music stand.

Rating: 4.5 / 5 — A beautiful, brief, and deeply resonant guide to therapeutic music-making.

 

$50 registration fee.

*Not open to current or former Rutgers University Newark students.

drmatthewgiobbi@musepsyche.com to register.

 

Psychology for Creative & Performing Artists Lectures

12 Propositions of Alfred Adler

This blog originally appeared on October 20, 2013.

Let's dwell in the work of Alfred Adler; his cultural, group, and individual processes of a mediated world and a mediated self. Adler began with 12 propositions which serve as the ground or referent for his working system. Like the Ptolemaic, geocentric, worldview; it can function pragmatically. What interests us here is not objective Truth, but rather a functional, pragmatic, system that is both useful and thoughtful. We approach Adler with the attitude of radical empiricism.

The 12 propositions (paraphrased):

1. The fundamental human condition is a striving from a state of "felt minus situation towards a plus situation, from a feeling of inferiority towards superiority, perfection, totality."
2. We strive towards a biological and environmental self-ideal, a fiction that we (ultimately) create and choose to endorse as our guiding fiction.
3. We go about our business largely unaware of our guiding fiction, it is unconscious.
4. The goal (guiding fiction) is a final cause. It is a teleological pull towards the self-deal fiction. One must identify the final fiction to organize the behavior into meaningfulness.
5. Ones style of life is shaped by this final fiction from an early age. Behavior that seems contradictory or absurd becomes meaningful when viewed from the final fiction of the self-ideal.
6. The style of life is a system that is comprised of conscious and unconscious processes.
7. Biological and environmental factors are relative to the goal. Genes and experience are not direct causes but probabilities that function through the style of life towards a self-ideal.
8. An individual's opinion of themselves and their worldview (enframing) influence all psychological processes.
9. The individual self is embedded with the social context. The self and context are not independent.
10. All biological and personal desires become social desires.
11. The goal of the healthful individual is social interest; an un-narcissistic, non-ego-centered life.
12. Maladjustment includes lack of social interest, a persistent and defining sense of inferiority, and a goal of personal superiority over others. 

Adler proposes a psychology of context. How can we understand the individual-mediated (figure-ground) phenomena of media psychology through this pragmatic system of thought? What are the implications for thinking through cultural phenomena that we have encountered in media and psychology? If we ask the questions; how does this behavior serve to move from a state of minus (inferiority) to a state of plus? How does the style of life form the worldview that produces phenomena? How can we think from new directions when we consider the fictional finaltude of a media producer and media re-broadcaster (persona)?

Direct comments, questions, & corrections to Matthew Giobbi.