Remembering Mrs. Taubman
I first met Dorothy Taubman during the height of her celebrity in the 1980s. She was the most controversial piano teacher in New York, and possibly the most famous. Media attention had been increasing over the previous decade as, after all, controversy sells newspapers. She claimed to have created a so-called “new” piano technique based on science, but this was no novelty. Other people had made such a claim in years prior only to have it be debunked through noticeable pedagogical failure, or an inability to survive legitimate scientific testing. This was more a cultural curiosity than an area of serious journalistic inquiry in the middle decades of the century. Newspapers found the topic of interest in a Sunday-supplement sort of way. But Mrs. Taubman’s appearance on the scene tended to drag the topic into seriousness over time.
The world had not yet noticed that musician’s injuries were a long-standing, historical problem. RSI or carpal tunnel syndrome were words that would not enter the common parlance for a few decades or so. A major international medical conference, entitled “The Biology of Music Making,” had inaugurated the new subspecialty of music medicine in the late 1970s. Mrs. Taubman had presented her first and most important paper there in the conference’s early proceedings. The doctors there had been both welcoming and curious about her ideas, but generally not motivated to embrace them clinically. Yet media attention on Mrs. Taubman did not abate. Subsequent interviews seemed to go on persistently, in every major news outlet. There had been a documentary produced a few years before that had gotten a lot of airplay. A video production company filmed Mrs. Taubman’s “book” the year I first came to the Institute, a 12 hour video documentation of her technique. Famous injured pianists were coming to see her for help, albeit very quietly. But widespread professional tolerance never appeared. Mrs. Taubman and her circle hoped the notoriety would bring increased acceptance in schools and conservatories. But it didn’t, and that sold even more newspapers.
I was 24 when I first stumbled on Mrs. Taubman’s method when my teacher at university, Nina Scolnik, finally told me where she got her odd ideas about piano playing. I was a young, very serious musician most interested in the music of Debussy and the French School of that period. I wanted to take the world by storm, but technical and physical insufficiency had so far gotten in my way. I sustained several injuries related to my playing by the time I was 19. First I strained the adductor pollicis tendon in my right thumb, from too much of the wrong kind of practice at measure 47 of the Chopin G Minor ballade. The injury prevented me, at its most severe, from turning a door knob or a set of keys in a lock for more than 6 weeks. The doctor I went to said, “Oh, it will heal on its own. Piano had nothing to do with it probably.” He also diagnosed a nascent case of bursitis in both shoulders. A short while later I strained the fascia in the back of my left palm, enough to cause a twinge every time I went to play a bass octave. My physical stamina was poor at the keyboard, and I began to experience regular headaches.
I never thought of myself as injured, ironically. These kinds of problems were commonplace among working musicians, or so I had been told. I chalked it up, at 19, to approaching middle age. Everyone told me to expect it. My first teacher had sometimes related stories of other working musicians she knew, all of whom had one sort of physical ailment or another. She had had a few herself. I later learned that injuries among professional musicians were an epidemic, making music one of the most injury-prone industries of the century. But my reaction at the time was blissful ignorance and unconcern. I was a busy young pianist, practicing 6 hours a day, teaching in the afternoons, rehearsing many nights, gigging on the weekends. My physical problems were just the “normal” I had to contend with, like anyone. Why would I be any different? All these problems became chronic over time but remained sub-acute. A person could live with them if they had to.
Scolnik was entirely discrete about her association with Taubman. Consequently, my first lessons at university did not enlighten me about the alien shore on which I had unwittingly landed. An exceptionally fine and brilliant player with a growing career nationally as a chamber musician, she had learned not to talk about Mrs. Taubman. Scolnik had first met and studied with Mrs. Taubman during her graduate career at the Juilliard School the decade before. Since coming to California, she had done a great deal of work with injured pianists. An increasing professional network was developing around her, of doctors who referred injured musicians to her. Her students always did very well in performance, competitions and auditions. Her injured students almost invariably got better, many of them completely. Regardless of the successes, other piano teachers had been less than welcoming if they heard the name “Taubman,” sometimes violently so. Scolnik had learned to play her cards very close to the vest.
I was deeply skeptical at first. Scolnik’s technical ideas were so different from what I had been taught, antithetical in concept to the orthodox Russian technique I had been trained in. Swallowing such heresies blindly was unthinkable. I had been to the major music festivals. I had heard the famous teachers there. I had performed in some of their master classes, and I knew what was what. But Scolnik won me over as time passed. Her suggestions worked so very well, even though obviously introductory and superficial. The artistic effects she showed me were so compelling, almost magical. I became persuaded to her point of view without her really saying it out loud. She eventually told me about Mrs. Taubman, the summer institute in Amherst, and her long association with both the woman and the method. Then she suggested I come as a student the following summer. Oh yes, she said one day, I’m on the faculty there.
My readers may not be aware of the state of affairs in conservatories and the better college-level music programs, especially for those who have not studied music. You will hear, if you go to any of their classes, public lessons or concerts, very talented and earnest students playing as well as they can. But you will only hear one or two “stars.” Those are the few exceptional talents that stand out from the rest by their easy virtuosity, their technical command, and sometimes their artistic maturity. They don’t just play well, they play brilliantly, with few or no obvious impediments in even the most difficult literature. Their technical freedom allows their imaginations to give expression to their personal vision of the music. They have found a voice, and they use it. Everybody else is obviously talented, but one wishes they could play better. Teachers always promote the “star” talents above the others naturally, for both personal and professional reasons. Such favoritism gets more obvious the higher you go in the musical education “org chart,” although local and regional teachers play the game too. It has not yet occurred to anyone that these disparities and shortcomings are the fault of the technique being taught. Instead, they are chalked up to an uneven, and unfair, distribution of so-called “talent.” Few have it, and it can’t really be taught or so it is generally believed. Most every teacher complains about how their students often don’t “get it.” But it never occurs to them that the shortcoming may be theirs.
Having said that, readers will imagine my shock and delight during the first few days of attending the Taubman Institute in Amherst. Mrs. Taubman had each of her students give a recital every night, during the two weeks of the Institute. I was bowled over by the pianist who played the first night, Sondra Tammam, who opened every institute recital season. She played a full program of nothing but the most taxing works, and did so in the most authoritative and masterly way. One would have to pay very good money to hear a pianist play like that in any concert hall in the world, if you could even find someone like that. Then the second night, another Taubman student played even better than Tammam the first night. And the third night, my astonishment knew no bounds as the next pianist played even more brilliantly and effortlessly than the one the night before, and so forth. I really didn’t know what to say by the end of the first week. Each of Mrs. Taubman’s students was a fully fledged virtuoso, yet completely individual in their musical personality. It was a feat no other major piano teacher could produce with any consistency. Important teachers often produce students who sound just like the teacher, or try to very badly. Mrs. Taubman had found a way to let each pianist developer their own artistic voice, and to play like the gods of old.
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I was hooked. Back at school, I told Scolnik I would follow her into a bonfire if I could play like that. She led me into a long period of retraining that took apart and then rebuilt the most basic aspects of my playing. I was not a quick student, and it took me a very long time to master the technique. The first effect came early, thankfully. All my aches and pains disappeared in the first few months and never came back. My playing began to take on a bit more pulled-together, expressive quality but with some obvious physical limits. My tone production became more varied and controlled, even though it was early in the game. Other people began to notice.
I finished my first degree in 1988. In my last school year, I was fortunate enough to be invited to study French music with the celebrated American composer and pianist Noel Lee in Paris. It was an offer I could not say no to, even if I was not completely pulled together technically. So off I went for a few years to learn as much as I could. Graduate school after Paris was another step in my process, and a fortuitous one. My old department gave me a couple of teaching jobs and a fellowship that paid for my schooling. This allowed me to pick up my studies with Scolnik right where I left off. Scolnik is a brilliant and insightful teacher as well as being an outstanding musician, and I was very grateful for the opportunity. At the Taubman Institute, I worked my way up to become a teaching assistant. I began to approach the issue of pianist’s injuries in my teaching as a problem that could be solved through correct training. I began to think of virtuosity in a way that did not violate the physical mechanics of the human body, but as a result of a joint synergy.
And one day, the long-awaited miracle happened. The missing piece, a collapse of essential support in my finger and wrist, became apparent to both me and Scolnik. Within three weeks I could play with machine-like evenness in both sound and rhythm and no sense of physical effort. This is a quality very few players can produce and my playing had always lacked. A real legato sound suddenly came out of my hands where it never had before. Real legato playing is another quality that is as rare as can be among pianists. Speed just stopped being a problem one day. I learned the allegro of a Mozart concerto in three months and played it for end-of-year exams as well as many of the recorded artists. My final graduate recital was such a success that it put me up near the top of my class.
That is the great strength of Mrs. Taubman’s method. It can turn almost any healthy adult of even modest intelligence and ability into a virtuoso player. No other method has yet produced these results. Piano teaching has certainly become as hidebound and ossified as any other long-standing profession. One of its many lacunae is a complete lack of any grounding in human anatomy or physiology. Orthodox technical methods developed at a time in history when accurate scientific information had yet to be discovered. These methods were then handed down from a virtuoso player to their student, who became a master teacher, and then to their students. This blind following of an uninformed, hearsay pedagogical tradition has acted much to the profession’s detriment. Every pianist needs the technical mastery I so longed for. Yet it would never have appeared had I clung to the Russian technique I had been trained in initially. That approach had also contributed to me getting hurt. My injuries would never have resolved, and probably would have grown much worse.
Mrs. Taubman’s technical model is in contrast a marvel of economy and clarity, with deep insight into human anatomy and Classical Newtonian Mechanics. Her ideas about the division of labor and the timed coordination of working body parts are unique in pedagogical history. Their only analogues can be found quoted almost verbatim in the martial arts. They are also corroborated in medical research. Mrs. Taubman’s theory also presents a rudimentary strategic model of neuro-motor efficiency she called the interdependence of the hands. Her ideas on this count are so forward-thinking that they are only now being confirmed by brain research, 80 years later. Mrs. Taubman’s methods, and even her students, have been subject to scientific examination several times. These investigations have only confirmed the correctness of her technical model, and the therapeutic nature of her approach. Her successful clinical outcomes remain unprecedented, and are replicated by her best students. As only one example, I play the standard solo works and concerti in the literature required of any professional pianist, chamber music, and a good deal of the art song literature as well. I have performed these works before the public regularly throughout my career. And I have not had a recurrence of my own injuries since they subsided 40 years ago.
Another important change took place as I made progress in the method. Other teachers don’t discuss the subjective experience of the act of playing. I discovered this was because they themselves don’t have any way of relating physically to the keyboard cognitively or kinesthetically, so they can’t describe it let alone teach it. Suddenly, I did. The most advanced students at the Institute hinted at these subjective, paradoxical changes they were experiencing as they progressed in their study. They were even touted in the Institute brochure. “Leaps That Don’t Miss” was one of the claims made there that became an object of gentle ridicule among the Institute habitués. It sounded like a cheap, too-good-to-be-true come-on, or possibly a homily found stitched on a gift-shop pillow.
But then I started having these experiences too. Organizing the movement patterns, the “choreography,” made it possible to engage my attention on only one event at a time. When that was complete, I started the next “thing.” Playing suddenly became a series of resting moments, waiting for the next event to take place. Daily instrumental practice was suddenly transformed into a microscopically precise examination of events in real time, finishing one event, relating to the start of the next, that no other technical method ever produces in students. Passages in speed suddenly didn’t seem fast at all. I became acutely aware of every note I was playing, how I played it, with ample time to control everything. The sense of physical effort required dropped to nothing. I had tremendous physical resources at my disposal, that I almost never had to use to their limits. In a weird, quantum paradox, I might have to use almost all the arm weight available to play a really fast scale or arpeggio, just to make it break even and feel like nothing. Fortissimo suddenly felt like pianissimo. The organization alone did tremendous things for memorization. Breaking the movement patterns down into small, related events and understandable packets of information made it easy to learn them no matter the texture performed.
Mrs. Taubman’s coordinate motion theory is clearly one of the 100 greatest inventions of the 20th century. It is far more than a simple advance in musical pedagogy. Rather, it describes a universal model of efficient use of the human body, presenting a set of human kinematic and kinetic principles that go far beyond the piano. These intrinsic factors of training, technique and tool use can be applied to any work performed with the human body. The perspective is largely absent from the field of ergonomics and human factors. Coordinate motion theory can be both protective and therapeutic when applied to other fields. And just like with pianists, it can also be synergistic. That is how I was able to adapt Mrs. Taubman’s piano technique to injured computer users, with exactly the same ground-breaking clinical results. My excursion into industrial medicine and hygiene turned into basic research and a patent back in the 1990s, numerous clinical and field collaborations, a number of publications and conference papers, a few gigs on TV as a talking head, and a long career as a consultant to business and industry. I even got involved in the development of public policy at the state and federal level, thanks to this perspective and my clinical and field outcomes.
I never studied privately with Mrs. Taubman, to be clear. I played in her master class, and I studied under her in workshops at the Institute. I heard her give master classes countless times, and I heard her principal assistant Edna Golondsky lecture on Mrs. Taubman’s technique every summer for years. The heavy lifting of my private lessons took place in Nina Scolnik’s studio, to whom I remain perpetually grateful not only for her fine and sensitive teaching but also for her endless encouragement. Yet I consider myself a devoted student of Mrs. Taubman’s approach technically, philosophically and professionally. Mrs. Taubman was unfailingly supportive of students in public forums. She was vastly generous to me when I played for her. She was always a vision in her public appearances with a white bouffant halo, pearls, stacked heels, and a flowered dress from Bloomingdale’s. The vocal twang was unvarying, the product of a persistently depressed soft palate. She projected a towering energy despite her diminutive frame. Her generally bad jokes could be lethal, and her musical ideas were just as startling as her technique. She steadfastly owned her own genius, despite occasional barbs from detractors. She could be uncompromisingly protective of herself if challenged.
The Institute attracted at its peak several hundred students internationally who attended the summer sessions. There was a core group of about 30 of us who were younger and had been there a while. We clearly understood that we were on the edge of something really new. We were usually completing degree programs at good schools and were very serious. We had all become teaching assistants or were on the road to, had played in the master class, and were developing teaching studios in our respective geographical regions. Virgin ground was being broken. Mrs. Taubman’s endless enthusiasm for her subject spurred us on. We had no idea where it was going, but we knew it was something big. I remember it as one of the most propulsively exciting times of my life.
My other teachers turned me into a musician, and possibly an artist. I remain unendingly grateful to them for helping me become those things. But Mrs. Taubman made me into a pianist, a real one.
