Ten Things I Wish I Could Have Understood about Taubman Technique from the Very Beginning
4. Tightness in the upper arm and shoulders makes it difficult to get the benefits of rotation.
Tensions in your shoulder girdle and upper arms totally detract from your Taubman technique (or any other technique, for that matter) accomplishing what it’s supposed to. These tensions impede rotation and your ability to have a “good down in every note.” They put brakes on the whole works, hampering you from getting to each place you need to be next. (Think pedaling a bicycle with the hand brakes on.) Even a highly skilled teacher may not notice your tightness, and just a little bit of it goes a long way--not in a good way either! With huge focus on rotation at the beginning of Taubman work, it can be difficult to truly appreciate how debilitating these tensions can be, how incompatible with the goal of benefiting from rotations. (In my own case, they dogged me for a very long time, even when I was taking lessons.)
Over time, I found a solution to my own problem shoulder area. My solution involved consciously coordinating releases of upper arm tension with the over-under cycle, something that anyone can learn with some direction and determination. (As Otto Ortmann observed, highly skilled piano playing involves complex coordinations and timings of contraction and release among muscles--something I assure you all successful Taubman players do all over the place.) So, if upper arm tensions keep getting in your way, don’t despair! It doesn’t mean you don’t have talent, but rather just a debilitating habit that can be fixed.
In that regard, consider the sports practice cliché where beefy football players repeatedly ram their shoulders against a padded board. (I suspect that all the movies, shows, commercials, etc., that show such scenes are using the same stock footage, but I haven't had a chance to research this yet.) They are isolating one of many skills involved in playing well so that their game-playing ability isn’t built from shoddy components. Do those guys feel the thrill of the game when they ram their shoulders against that board? Probably not. But they know that the game is more thrillingly played when they take the time to exercise such abilities.
The pianist’s equivalent to ramming the shoulder against a padded board is not unpleasant, though not exactly as fun as zooming through the Fantaisie-Impromptu. It involves dropping the arm into a well-structured hand (see 1, 2, and 3)--without being concerned about rotation. You then allow it to sit there, well balanced, while making sure that you have released every muscle in your upper arm and upper body that has no business being activated. (My upcoming workbook will be more specific.)
So, if you feel inclined to sidestep working on relaxing your upper arms and shoulders when you play, consider those beefy football players and everything they are willing to do to put on a good game. Football players and pianists share some common ground after all!
Next: landing on the thumb.