Twelve Metaphors to Help You Understand Taubman Technique on a Body Level
Etch A Sketch
The Etch A Sketch toy, limited as it is to creating horizontal and vertical lines, provides for a pretty dry experience compared to painting with a brush or drawing with a pencil. Though online examples of Etch A Sketch art attest to the determination of human creative spirit, most of us would agree that the extreme rigid limitation imposed by this toy on one’s artistic expression is kind of laughable. My own childhood efforts at creating more organic shapes than, say, a sectional view of a staircase, were good for a laugh and not much more, but it didn’t prevent me from trying every once in a while!
Rotation provides a means for moving, up and over, toward each new note. It has a vertical and horizontal component. In and of itself rotation doesn’t account for the complexity of movement necessary for beautiful playing, not to mention traversing distances. “Walking arm” and “in-and-out” belong to the horizontal plane. “Shifting” adds a bit of verticality, providing a tool for getting from the “first floor” of the white notes to the “second floor” of the black, and vice versa.
Beyond this, I have heard several authorities opine that, once you’ve learned the horizontal and vertical aspects of the technique well, it becomes easy to intuit the diagonals, available through over-shaping, under-shaping, and the swinging movements of the upper arm and torso. That, or you need someone to explain it to you on a case-by-case basis. But I would argue that we can do better than this. Human understanding is always marching on, so we don't need to explain all diagonal movement in terms of a few fundamental principles stated by Taubman herself. To help a broader swath of the piano playing population more thoroughly, we will have to concoct a better offering.
To that end, I predict that a science-based pedagogy for using the larger levers will unfold--one that relies on the sound substrate of Taubman's ideas. I look forward to saying more on this topic in the future.
Leaving alone for the time being (because it is too big a topic for this list) the question of what rules might be offered to help people better understand over and under (sooner rather than later in the learning process), I bring up, for your body awareness, two joints with a capacity to shift your direction: the wrist (to a greater degree) and the joint of the large knuckle ridge (to a lesser degree). If you don’t become exquisitely attuned to the capacity of these joints to move you diagonally to the next key spot (particularly with the help of “angular momentum”) you will be ignoring an important source of agility.
The message behind the metaphor: The horizontal and vertical dials of this technique do not necessarily lead you in the direction of helpful diagonals.