Ten Things I Wish I Could Have Understood about Taubman Technique from the Very Beginning
1. The wrist plays a huge role in making this technique work.
Your wrist has to feel very loose. But it must also be available to transfer the weight of the arm into the piano key. If you do not have this kind of good wrist, all the proper rotations in the world may get you to the top of Mount Tam (higher than where you were, but not quite worth months of trecking, perhaps), but not to the peak of that mountain I hope you aim to scale (Mount Washington? Denali? Kilimanjaro? Everest?). Personally, I think of the wrist and other structure issues as prerequisites to learning the rotations. If you don't truly understand what your wrist should and shouldn't be doing, you are going to be a while getting everything else to work.
I have had good success describing the ideal wrist to my students as follows.
The hand hangs from the end of the forearm as if from the end of a hollow pole, but without losing the “bridge shape” between hand and arm. If the hand hung any more loosely, it would droop or “wilt” and the bridge shape would be lost. The thumb will have to relax as well for this to work. What you should end up with is a very loose wrist and good hand structure.
I suspect this exercise is effective because it discourages contracting the fingers' flexor muscles to create rounded hand structure for piano playing. Rather, it encourages (I venture to guess) the extensors of the fingers and/or wrist, to counteract gravity pulling downward on the fingers from the big knuckle. The resulting hand/wrist structure can support the weight of the arm with what feels like nonexistent tension. Perhaps a biomechanist will step forward and confirm or correct this conjecture on my part, but, for whatever reason, this exercise taps into some quirk about the way the hand and arm are connected, and works for the piano!
Tensions in the fingers generally create tensions in the wrist. To prevent one and the other, learn, with your arm in this same position, to allow your fingers to dangle from the big knuckle, without any apparent muscular exertion. To get students to understand the feeling of the fingers dangling from the large knuckle, I have them pretend that their hand sits at a counter stool and that the fingers are the legs, dangling down because they can’t reach the floor. I use a pencil with a nice comfortable eraser and I have them “sit” their hand on it at the center of the palm. (Don't forget to leave the thumb relaxed, too! I tell students to let the "thumb meat"--the so-called thenar eminence on the palm side--to simply hang as well.)
Taubman maintained that the way your hand feels as it relaxes to the side of your body, from the end of a hanging arm, is a good model for the way it's supposed to feel at the piano. Though it is a revelation that your hand can be substantially relaxed when you play, I personally found this particular idea quite confusing. After all, gravity acts very differently upon the joints of your wrist and fingers in the two situations, so it's not really possible for the two to feel identical. The comparison also doesn't provide insight into the inevitable, minuscule contractions that are part of keeping minimal hand structure--insight that is critical with this most complicated of human joints.
What is the best way to learn to maintain this feeling in the wrist?
The best way to memorize the way the wrist should feel is to separate working on it from rotation exercises, such as the "five finger." We are simply not neurologically wired to assimilate too many coordinations at once, perhaps especially when simultaneously changing existing coordinations. You might practice “dropping” from the elbow onto the wrist/hand I just described, away from the piano so that your hand doesn't automatically assume the tension it may associate with playing. A forthcoming workbook will help with this.
Once you understand the feeling, you should be aware that playing continually introduces tensions, which must be continually shed. It is therefore important to learn to reinstate this feeling in the wrist. You might consider making that part of your "grouping" strategy.
You may ask, “But won’t this loose wrist buckle under the force of landing?” Yes! You must create the circumstances so that it doesn’t. This is why….