Ten Things I Wish I Could Have Understood about Taubman Technique from the Very Beginning
8. How to separate the different facets of the technique so that each can receive due attention.
Our brains and bodies are perfectly capable of learning new habits and coordinations, and of overriding old ones in the process. Scientists who research neuroplasticity have amply demostrated this. However, the level of mindfulness required to succeed is simply not that familiar to most of us.
To learn any complex coordination, it is crucial to break it into constituent parts rather than trying to grasp it in all its complexity, all at a go. Learning Taubman technique is no exception. Taubman coordinations are in fact extremely complex, with more of the body needing careful attention than you might think. This is particularly true if you must unlearn bad habits of holding tension as you learn it.
If you are one of those enviably well-trained pianists who already plays in a highly coordinated way, then Taubman technique is likely to fall into place much more easily for you than for others. I devised the six "S P rules" because the concepts of single and double rotation did not help me understand Taubman coordinations as being comprised of numerous and highly interrelated aspects, each of which needs to play its rightful role (and, conversely, avoid playing unnecessary roles). Without this understanding I was unable to fix those aspects that prevented the rotations from creating the degree of advantage I truly wanted. Without doing that fixing, the technique felt awkward, uncertain, and counterintuitive, but with fixing it felt brilliant!
Here are two of the ways that the S P rules helped me.
First, having gathered that having my arm behind every note is not optional, I also realized that I personally was very far from being able to do this consistently (mostly because I carried a lot of tension in my shoulders and upper arms). The six S P rules helped me separate the process of learning to use gravity from the process of learning how to rotate in the correct directions on an intutive level.
Second, I sensed early in my training that on some level the movement concepts the terms "single" and "double" were meant to express were really very simple. The six S P rules show that to be the case. They are numerically logical, and when the rotations are expressed in terms of logic that even young children can easily understand, the brain grasps them more intuitively and readily. This gives a pianist more immediate access to beneficial movement types.
As I found Taubman’s own terminology of rotation to be cumbersome (however much I felt that the movements they were meant to express were brilliantly helpful), I didn't want to use it with my students. I wanted to create a foundation for beginners that would readily lead into the most substantial Taubman training when and if they became ready, with little relearning required. Children easily grasp the six S P rules, and having done so, they don’t need explanations or demonstrations from me about what kinds of rotations to do where (assuming they understand arm weight well enough to be ready for this at all)—even in otherwise tricky places that involve the thumb. In fact, I've seen kids who understand arm weight start to do correct rotations quite intuitively. This all leaves me much more free to teach music in its totality.