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Teresa Dybvig |
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"Once I gave myself over the wisdom of the work, I made slow but sure improvement... [Taubman work] restored to me the joy of playing the piano. Today I don't even consider myself someone who has dystonia." — Dr. Mary Ellen Haupert, Assistant Professor of Music, Viterbo University When I first
began studying with Terry, I was severely injured as a result of problems in my
playing. Her expertise and knowledge of technical matters were invaluable as
she led me through an intense and rewarding transformation. My hands and
technique were improved so that I could return to playing unencumbered by pain
and with a level of control over sound that I had not previously experienced.
See more statements from students of Teresa Dybvig (opens in a new window) Thanks for a
welcome and evocative summary of Taubman essentials. You have wisely taken the
clannish mystique out of a thing that deserves to be told
openly. If it
weren't for you, I know that I wouldn't be playing the piano!
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Background Learning the Taubman Approach The Taubman Approach Retraining Background Dorothy Taubman's approach to piano technique is based on tenets as simple as the basic cooperative movements of the human body and the ergonomic beauty of the piano, yet is so subtle and refined that one could explore it for a lifetime. One exciting aspect of learning this method is that no matter how easy it feels and how good it sounds today, there is nearly always more freedom, greater variety of sound, greater speed, and greater expressive potential available. And it is a healthy technique with which a pianist can enjoy playing for a lifetime, avoiding the many injuries that afflict an alarming percentage of musicians. Many pianists with playing-related injuries have used this healthy technique to learn to play in better cooperation with their bodies, get rid of their problems, and return to playing. Many others have elected to study the technique so they could play their best, and coincidentally skip the injury altogether! Others study the technique so they can teach their students to play in a healthy way. It is a happy coincidence that when pianists play in a healthy way, they play well. Often even formerly injured pianists say that after studying the Taubman Approach, they are better pianists than they ever dreamed possible. The Taubman Approach is known for helping injured pianists recover and return to performing, but that is not why it came into being. Dorothy Taubman simply wanted to reach her own potential as a pianist, and help her students to do the same. She had the fantastic idea that if we used the best and most efficient movements in our bodies, and took advantage of the engineering of the instrument, we would fllourish. And it was true. The fact that it is a healthy way playing is a logical extension of the premise that the best movements of the body would create the best playing. Dorothy Taubman came to understand certain critical aspects of physically playing the piano so well that her technique seems comprehensive. She had the wisdom and objectivity to avoid the assumption that whatever she did, or was taught, is correct -- this was fortunate indeed, because it turns out that some commonly accepted concepts are truly not ideal for playing. Therefore, some principles of the Taubman Approach are groundbreakingly different from other piano pedagogies. This can elicit some resistance, but the logic of the technique has a way of winning people over. I'm sure the Taubman Approach doesn't have all the answers, if only because that seems unlikely, but after searching for answers on many medical and bodywork fronts, I can say that nothing else comes close. The Taubman Approach, applied well, contains more of the answers than any other approach to playing the piano. The premise of the Taubman approach is that all technical problems at the piano can be solved. Intelligent, informed practice is the solution rather than repetitious grinding. The skills acquired through the Taubman approach are real and enduring, and once achieved they open new and greater interpretive horizons. Background Learning the Taubman Approach The Taubman Approach Retraining Learning the Taubman Approach The best thing you can do for yourself if you want to incorporate the technique into your playing is to get some lessons with a good teacher. There is no substitute. Attending programs like The Well-Balanced Pianist will speed up your learning, because you receive intensive instruction, and understand the big picture faster. To obtain a comprehensive understanding of the Taubman Approach (which you may not need in order to play well), you need to take years of lessons, attend programs like The Well-Balanced Pianist to get a better understanding of the big picture, and watch The Taubman Techniques, ten lecture videos narrated mostly by Edna Golandsky, available from the Taubman Institute website. These are available in two sets of five, the first five of which are most fundamental. But a word about those videos. Sometimes people buy a set of videos thinking they can save money on lessons and just learn from the videos. Please don't fool yourself! The videos show you where you want to go, but they do not show you how to get from where you are to where you want to go. Most disturbingly (and ironically, and sadly), people who aren't taking lessons often build incoordinate movements into their hands and arms while trying to imitate movements they saw on the videos. People who try this route inevitably end up taking lessons. So just take the plunge and take some lessons if you want to learn the Taubman Approach. Background Learning the Taubman Approach The Taubman Approach Retraining The Taubman Approach Below are some of the basic tenets of the Taubman Approach. I would like to say, "Please don't try this at home," but I know some will not be able to resist, and I don't blame you. So please, experiment, but only apply any of this if it makes your hands and arms feel better. If it doesn't, it's a sign that it's not quite right. If it's not quite right, it won't improve your playing anyway, so abandon it until you can work with an excellent teacher. Even experts in the Taubman Approach have trouble being objective about their own playing. Often when I play for a wonderful Taubman teacher, he or she points out that I'm not completely following through with some element -- and coincidentally, it will be something I've talked about with five students that week! I find it helpful in practicing and teaching to divide Dorothy Taubman's discoveries into three arenas: alignment, balance, and movement. In order to attain their fullest potential, pianists need all three to play well. ALIGNMENT. Balance and healthy movement are possible only with good alignment. Dorothy Taubman realized that our natural alignment is the best alignment for playing the piano. You can see this alignment easily by letting your hand fall naturally to the side (do not reach to the floor! do not spread your fingers out or change your alignment at the wrist to look!), and looking at the shape of your forearm from the elbow to the tips of the fingers. All you need in addition is the toned and lively feeling in the hand and forearm that makes movement possible. BALANCE. Dorothy Taubman realized that pianists can balance into the piano as simply as one can stand on a floor. This balance is free from pushing or holding up. She invented a word, "contacting," to describe this simple balance. Contacting is when there is enough friction between the hand and the key that the fingers don't slide, the hand and arm don't need to hold up, and the hand and arm are not so heavy on the key that they go down. You can get this same balance at the bottom of any one key or chord. It is important both to be balancing forward into the piano (but not to the point of pushing) and balanced so that the heel of the hand is facing the floor and the fingers are resting on the middle of their pads. Since there is no tension from holding up or pushing down, the pianist can move in a flash to the next balanced place. The proper bench height is crucial to attaining this lovely and unremarkable balance. Taubman teachers call this feeling "resting down." This is meant as a neutral term, but the feeling people have when they get there can be anything but down. Their descriptions say a lot about where they came from: "down" (they used to hover), "there" (they used to fidget), un-there (they used to try too hard), and "floating" (they used to sink heavily). For people who tend to sink heavily, sometimes the term "alert resting" is more helpful than "resting down." MOVEMENT. In short, Dorothy Taubman came to understand the movements that would help us move from one balanced place to the next while maintaining our alignment. These are the walking hand and arm, forearm rotation, forearm movements in and out of the black key area, and shaping. In all movements, all parts move in the same direction at the same time (though sometimes not the same amount -- when you lift the fingers, the arm also lifts, but not as much as the palm). She also understood two important ways the piano will help us play it, if we honor its engineering: 1. Since the hammer hits the string when we move through the aftertouch (the bump a little way between the top of the key and the keybed), we need to aim to the aftertouch and follow through to the bottom of the key -- not stopping at the aftertouch, and certainly not aiming to the bottom of the key. This will give us that piano's most beautiful sound, allow us to avoid any feeling of impact, and give us a stable place from which to move. We can also modify the timing of the touch and the amount of the forearm weight to change volume and sound quality. 2. The piano will create staccato for us if we touch it correctly -- an exquisite balance followed by a release from the key which allows the key to move the hand and arm back to the surface, feeling much like a trampoline. Mrs. Taubman understood many other aspects of movement too -- which hand should move first when both hands have jumps, and how to teach the hands to cue one another, for example. I feel I have not yet come across the pianistic challenge that her work does not address. Background Learning the Taubman Approach The Taubman Approach Retraining Retraining My thoughts about retraining have evolved over the years. If you've read this section before, you could probably chart the evolution of my thinking as I modified, changed, and even contradicted myself here. My thoughts seem to have settled, though, and here they are. I used to define retraining as a course of study of movement separated from repertoire, progressing step by step from learning how to play a single note through learning notes in a row, then thumb crosses, then chords, etc. Taubman teachers used to think that taking a break from all playing obligations and retraining the technique from the simplest elements up was the only way to incorporate healthy habits into playing. Some may still believe that, but I do not. Retraining in this way can remove good habits from people's playing, as well as bad, and encourages impractical movements. It also temporarily severs the link between the music and the body. I don't understand why, but I've noticed that if that link is severed for too long, retraining becomes unnecessarily and painfully protracted. In my opinion, one should retrain in this manner only if he or she is injured and cannot make positive changes in a more integrated manner. I now define retraining much more broadly. To me, retraining is the act of making changes to the way one plays. Many people make positive changes right in the repertoire. To do this, they become familiar with a new alignment, balance, or movement at a lesson, and begin to apply it to the music right there. I've had injured students who were able to successfully change their technique while playing repertoire. I feel we should have names for these two kinds of retraining. I would like to come up with short names, but so far all I've been able to think of is "retraining out of context" (or "retraining from the beginning") and "retraining within context" (or maybe "contextual retraining"). Well, these are not sound bytes. If you can think of something better, please let me know. No matter whether you do it in repertoire or not, retraining involves a detailed examination of your alignment and movement, with the aim of replacing incoordinate and injurious habits with healthy, coordinate ones. Pianists who retrain their techniques build their consciousness while they rebuild their techniques, so they eventually know consciously how to play each finger in a beautiful toned balance, how to move from note to note, how to play chords -- how to handle every musical situation the repertoire requires. If they were injured, they usually regain full facility and comfort. They share the same end result with pianists who were never injured -- all become more capable pianists than they imagined they could be. So. When retraining out of context is necessary, do it with a whole heart. When it's not, please do not feel like you're cheating by making changes from a different angle. The length of the retraining process varies greatly from person to person, and depends largely on their goals. How easy a person will find retraining, and how soon he will reach his original goal, depends upon his ability to learn to consciously direct the hand and arm to do new and different movements with ease. Sometimes this skill comes quite readily, and sometimes it has to be learned gradually. People who stop exploring the Taubman Approach as soon as they get out of pain may have a shorter stint than others, but goals have a way of shifting. When pianists start they may think they just want to... fill in the blank!... make a more beautiful sound, feel better, play better octaves, or better scales... But many people realize that there is a whole world of knowledge available, and they become greedy. In a good way! Greedy for improvement! So they often take lessons for longer than they expected when they first started. A note to people who are retraining from injury: the pursuit of this kind of change can seem teeth-grittingly serious. However, as in all other aspects of learning, it goes better if it is approached as a joyful journey of exploration and discovery. This is possible! It's very interesting to get to know yourself, your body, and how you can change its habits to better ones. Students of the Taubman approach find that many aspects of their lives become easier. Since it is based on human physiology and laws of movement, one can use it to solve problems in Chopin, play the violin, or to drive an automobile. People learn about their inner selves too, on the way to becoming their own best pianist. One of my students said to me once, "Before I encountered the Taubman approach, everything was about pushing and 'efforting.' Now it's about letting things flow and getting out of my own way. I've learned that I don't need to create an artifice of myself, that my self will do just fine." Quite a powerful lesson to get from a piano technique. Copyright © 2004-2010 Teresa Dybvig |
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