Taubman ideas

I believe that Horowitz virtually always maintained the arch of the hand, even when using flat fingers. When you talk about him using rotation in conjunction with the arch, are you talking about slow rotation that is easy to perceive, as opposed to Taubman's "invisible rotation"? What do you mean by "swiveling", and how does it differ from rotation?

I think this wonderful masterclass with Sebok might illustrate what healthy rotation is. Still his fingers are resistant his arch is healthy and he keeps his wrists low. And what a human beeing!

Sebok was a real master at conveying the essential concepts behind piano playing and music making. What he did there was instantly diagnose one of the limitations in the students playing and he demonstrated how this limits the student's capacity to convey . The student can more or less play the piece but there is no compelling sound image motivating everything else. So the concept of whole body alignment and positioning your finger mechanism the right way in relation to the body in order to get maximal tonal control is absolutely essential to piano technique. That being said the actual movements required to keep the body in alignment are extremely complex and you cannot think about them too much. It would be ridiculous to study a piece of music and say "I will align my body this way to play this note." Instead you experiment and learn to sense what is going on with greater clarity and detail and eventually gain some level of mastery over a passage so that you can as Sebok said "have opinions about the music." Schnabel I think used to follow this approach. See if you can find Clifford Curzon's interview on the pedagogical styles of Schnabel and Wandowska. To sum up, Sebok's advice is wonderful but it is also tailored to a particular student's needs and it should liberate the student from certain restrictions, not become a physical obsession. By the way I am surprised nobody has commented on the Sebok thread I opened a while ago. The more recently posted masterclass is also very interesting and you also get to see a great musician demonstrate passages from a piece and explain them in ways that aren't too technical.

I've watched the Sebok-clips and I wish I'd gone to his classes if I'd only had known. Very few if any has his ability to be both fantastic pianists and teachers. I imagine his immense personal suffering of which he speaks in one clip gave him another dimension. There are also some masterclassclips with Leon Fleisher well worth watching.More and more clips from different masterclasses appears on youtube and now there are some clips from Cziffra practising. Pretty interesting no fancy stuff there.

The ideas you're putting forth here are right on the mark - Sebok offers a wonderful example of how aligning the physical and the expressive is absolutely essential to real artistry, and he has much to say about to do this which is excellent. AFF

*2 June 2013 I've edited this from its previous forms as, upon further review, I think my previous comments were not in the greatest of taste... ROTATION? All schools of piano start with some premises. Alan's was structural integrity of the hand's "Russian Arch." Taubman's is (arguably........) rotation. (It is interesting to note that many teachers acquainted with Taubman technique who utilize it in their teaching often don't incorporate rotation into their lessons. Some of the Taubman students might obsess over it, yet most teachers familiar with Taubman don't feel as though it's the most important feature (though maybe a good first step). They teach 'shaping.' They teach 'in-and-out.' They teach 'walking hand and arm.' Etc. Then again... I should note: the Golandsky faculty member I've studied with here in the Bay Area may not have even uttered the word "rotation" once during my lesson with him. Not once. But that's just one lesson. Still, it tells you that there's a lot more to it than that....) So anyway, take from the Taubman teachers what you can. THEIR ADVICE IS VERY VALUABLE. Alan, in this very thread, (though he denies that rotations occur on every single note) has already admitted that he has seen students who benefited greatly from practicing rotation. Sometimes, it may be in our best interest to stop caring about what the objective reality is behind what we're doing. Playing the piano is a subjective activity. If doing something 'silly' like practicing rotation helps, DO IT. If it benefits you to believe in such a ridiculous idea (namely, that rotation occurs on every single note, even at blistering fast tempi) then BELIEVE it. Who cares, right? So go ahead and practice that rotation. It definitely does help in some cases (though it's not an end all be all). And practice moving skillfully in and out of the black keys; it is an indispensable pianistic technique. Practice shaping; it is the suppleness of the wrist that Chopin sought. And keep in mind: Taubman's cohorts are in the business of injuries, not creating them. So in the very least, if you try it all out, you know you will not be hurting yourself (that's assuming you're smart about it). COMBINING SCHOOLS OF TECHNIQUE Now here. Lately, I have been reading Alan's book (). I bought it years ago, but at the time was not pianistically sophisticated enough to get much out of it. Having returned to Alan's book, I now find myself integrating the two approaches into a unified whole. And believe me, it is possible. . Not even close. In fact, they go very well together. Two ingredients of a great recipe. Alan leaves some ingredients out. For instance, I don't recall Alan ever talking about moving in and out of the black keys as being an aspect of piano technique. Yet it's near the top of the list of "tools" for the Taubman teachers. But there's a tendency in Taubman to ignore the idea of the hands structural integrity. I think that if you spend so much time practicing rotation (a forearm movement), it's easy to forget about the hand itself. And that's where Alan comes in. Don't dismiss Taubman just because you guys think the concept of rotation on every single note is silly. To assume that that is the entirety of what they have to offer is . Any school of piano technique will be incomplete. None of them has ALL the answers. So it is our job as pianists to go out there and take in as much of these ideas as possible, keep the stuff that works, and can the rest. And always be experimenting at the piano.

Dear John, Welcome to our Forum: I don't think I can recall any previous member arriving with such an impressive splash! I really appreciate your post; you have articulated many things that I have been trying to say for years. There's a page at that gives a pretty negative evaluation of the Taubman school - I like yours more; I find it more balanced and with your permission I would like to incorporate your words into that review - may I? (they would be respectfully submitted by J. M. or even some other initials if you will) There are many points to cover, let's see if I can touch on them all. 1) I have written elsewhere about a French guy who was a big Taubman devotee who came to my seminars in Paris and then became my private student. He demonstrated the positive aspects of practicing rotation. His hand had way more integrity than those of most adult beginners with 2 years' experience. Rotating had forced him to 'feel unstable,' and his hand arch had figured out how to stand up to help him find a stability that was functional. 2) I would say my basic premise is not really the Russian arch, nor even the three arches I talk about in the special nature of the thumb, etc... 3) Nice to hear that the Taubmanites you know don't talk about rotation. I find that very cool! Similarly, one 'Lister-Sinkerite' wrote me that Barbara never once said to her, "the purpose of the hand structure is to transfer the weight of the arm to the key..." So a school, even a dogmatic one, can evolve - this is good! 4) I agree wholeheartedly that Dorothy's and mine approaches can dovetail beautifully, and I do revere her as a true pioneer. After all, we are both about coordinate movement. My job with the Taubman/Golandsky students I worked with was to 'fill in the missing pieces' but I enjoyed doing so and found I could do so without disparaging their previous experience. It was a case of, "When she said this, she meant " and showing them what was really involved in a specific technique. Once again, thank you John for your valuable contribution to our forum. AFF

Now, here's a funny coincidence: The Golandsky Institute hosts a seminar in Berkeley every Fall. It so happens to be going on this weekend. And , I signed up. I spent the past 6 hours observing private lessons given by one of the premier members of the Golandsky Institute (he's actually a fantastic teacher). Here are some quotes I transcribed that you might find interesting. They are all from one lesson: To the student who, in playing a rapid passage, was moving too much: "Don't think rotationally so much. Just think ." ---A la T'ai Chi walking? "Too much of the rotation will be tiring for you. It may have helped when you were working on it, but now you need to let it go." ---Alan, isn't this the exact same probably you encountered with you student in Paris? "At speed, it feels like the thumb is . "Anything you play is going to have a vertical moment. A vertical . Another passage where her movements were wobbly and cumbersome: "I'm starting to think that the rotation is too big a part of the mix. Let's think shaping more. Don't think about rotating on individual notes." "Is there any kind of devoted to explaining how stopping movement in order to "prepare" a sound is an admirable intention, but the muscular contractions engaged in order to make the stop happen actually end up stiffening the mechanism. Alan, just today I signed up for the workshop in Salt Lake City. See you this summer!

If you watch a slow motion video of Horowitz, you will see constant in and out motion. Works pretty well. As far as rotation goes the Czerny daily pretty well takes care of that. a good study in leaps is demonstrated by Dick Hyman and Dick Wellstood in a duo they aptly named "Stide Monster". Jim

I will answer Dr Jazz's post first - it relates to something John said about 'in and out of the black keys' being a good, basic part of the Taubman regime but which I don't talk about. I guess I don't talk about it because I take if for granted. I do it automatically, and I find more often I have to students overdoing it (especially in chromatic octaves) because it is interfering with their fluid movement. I give them this way of playing chromatic octaves where the thumb on the white keys stays snuggled up against the front of the black key, and the thumb on the black key stays at the very edge. Then with a little hand swiveling you can completely eliminate 'in and out of the blacks' which makes the passage go like the wind. And now to John's comments: the intriguing question pops into my mind: have the Taubman people secretly been reading ??? It's probably not that, it's much more likely that they have simply been working with coordinate motion and learning as they go along, by experience, what works and what is the best way of explaining it. One response to your earlier post which I forgot to mention: I have come across people who, I regret to say, injured by studying the Taubman technique. Seems hard to believe but I can see that if someone gets into relaxation for instance too much, then tries some technically demanding repertoire, they could hurt themselves. Kind of like, after a really powerful Feldenkrais lesson we advise the client not to do anything too strenuous or vigorous for a day because they could pull a muscle that is now much looser than it is used to being... Thanks for your registration, John, I do look forward to working together next summer and seeing if I can measure up to your current teachers!:) For those of you who don't know about the Institute, here are the links for the Western division (which John mentioned): and the original Institute at Smith College, now expanded to two weeks: Tell your friends! AFF