Twelve Metaphors to Help You Understand Taubman Technique on a Body Level
Connect the Dots
Dots the Cat, created for us by my once-fourteen-year-old daughter (funny, how that now high school senior’s different ages slipped behind!), is here to remind you that continuity of sound at the piano is really a connection of sounds that were each set into motion at the “point of sound.” If you want to connect the dots in a way that suggests organic shapes, you need to use curvilinear lines, always taking into account the locations of the next few dots. Otherwise how can Dots ever become his suave self?
Good downs at the piano are like Dots’s dots, uniform in their feeling of your arm’s weight sitting against the key (to be distinguished from what Taubman calls “hovering”). But to create continuity of force in a stream of notes that make up a musical shape, each lever (upper back, shoulder girdle, upper arm, forearm, wrist, hand/fingers) needs to behave according to a system that exists in the body/mind of the pianist. These muscles, working jointly with intricate timings, create the curvilinear stuff that connect the dots into the desired sound world.
Sometimes the curvilinear line that your body creates moves more forward than side to side; sometimes the rate of upward motion is on the incline. Sometimes you allow freefall in one lever or another, and this changes the curve of the arm (depending on what everything else is doing). To create curvilinear movement without extraneous effort, you allow movement to “translate” (angular momentum).
One example of this, one that is absolutely critical to understand, occurs at the moment that the double rotation begins. To be able to regroup so that you can do consecutive pronations or consecutive supinations of the forearm, you must have that dead stop to the rotating forearm. However, not every lever stops, and that is how your body shifts from the horizontal movements across the piano key, into a different direction. If every lever comes to a dead stop, you could not have continued curvilinear movement. But in well executed Taubman technique, every lever does not come to a dead stop, and that way the momentum of forearm rotation is translated into a different direction, often forward or diagonal.
The message behind the metaphor: Your piano music is made of “dots” of uniformly good downs, meaning there is a consistency to the “leaned in” feeling from note to note. Your good downs will help create continuity of sound, and a base of force from which you can manipulate the dynamics. Downs are a necessary condition for creating useful and effortless curvilinear movements.