Twelve Metaphors to Help You Understand Taubman Technique on a Body Level
Gears in a Swiss Watch
Imagine how very tiny some of the parts of this Swiss watch are! How carefully machined! Marvel at how absolutely perfectly all these parts must work together in order to perform the precision task of keeping time! Perhaps a person with an extraordinary mechanical aptitude could, with great patience and perseverance, figure out how to put these parts together to create a working watch, assuming that she had that particular end goal in mind.
Your wrist is something like that Swiss watch, but its movements are much more difficult to explain and reproduce. It contains the smallest, most subtle moving parts of your piano playing mechanism, hidden from your view like the tiny parts of a Swiss watch. Gears change the torque, direction, and timing of a power source, something that they can do because they are designed with interconnected teeth. Do your wrists have teeth? Not in concrete terms. With great alignment you can make your wrist feel like it has ‘em, and one of the purposes of that is to change the torque, direction, and timing of your own “power source:" your arm. This is an important part of well-executed Taubman technique, though harder to describe than forearm rotation.
You don’t have to have extraordinary mechanical aptitude to get your wrist bones working toward this end—you just have to learn to pay attention to the sensations in your wrist, and for the “teeth” of good alignment. You can’t see these “teeth” in an anatomical drawing or anywhere else, but you can feel them. A good down ephemerally locks an excellent structure into place, with the wrist being arguably the most finicky part of that structure. You can feel a different alignment of “teeth” with each playing finger, and refining your sense of each alignment will help you immeasurably as you move along in your understanding of this technique.
Remember, without a power source, gears have no point. The power source in Taubman technique is your arm.
The message behind the metaphor—learn to pay attention to the sensations in your wrist. Remember the ones that are favorable to your playing and reproduce them until they click for you. This is every bit as important as learning the patterns of forearm rotation if you want to go all the way with this technique.