Twelve Metaphors to Help You Understand Taubman Technique on a Body Level
Tripping
As you walk briskly along the wooded trail, admiring the woodland scenery, your foot unexpectedly gets caught under the root of tree and your body flies forward! As you hurl toward the ground, though, you notice that right in front of you is a blob of something, and it’s not your grandmother’s shoo fly pie. You quickly assess that you would not want that blob affixed to your nice Woolrich jacket—so, you instinctively coordinate yourself to land to the left of the blob. (Thankfully your foot just nicked that root and your ankle survives the fall unharmed.)
The feeling of having a finger stuck securely against a key has to do with sufficient friction rather than being caught under something. As with the entire body in what biomechanists call the “tripping effect,” though, the arm continues to “hurl,” in some combination of forward and sideways directions (though in a relatively microscopic way) toward the next place. Any falling of the arm toward the body, before the down, is counterproductive to this process.
The previous example of pole vaulting, as well as the next example from gymnastics, involve this tripping effect.
The message behind the metaphor: To get around effortlessly at the piano, you need a “down” good enough to allow for a tripping effect. That is to say, the finger stops dead against the key while other parts of you keep moving. This requires good hand/arm structure, and a loose upper arm and wrist that willingly give way to the arm’s desired movement.