Dorothy Taubman
Dorothy Taubman was an American music teacher, lecturer, and founder of the Taubman Institute of Piano. She developed the "Taubman Approach" to piano playing; her approach to piano technique was based on an analysis of the motions needed for virtuosity and musical expression. She first earned a reputation through the high rate of success of her method in curing playing injuries, though her approach provoked controversy by questioning the physiological soundness of some tenets of traditional piano teaching.
History
Taubman directed the Dorothy Taubman Institute of Piano at Amherst College in Massachusetts from 1976 to 2002. She was formerly a professor at Temple University and at the Aaron Copland School of Music in Queens College, and was featured in numerous articles and interviewed in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times; and the Piano Quarterly, Piano and Keyboard, and Clavier magazines. Among others, Taubman has been noted for her work with injured musicians including the American pianist Leon Fleisher, who was forced to play with only one hand for many years due to injuries he sustained playing the piano; the piano teacher Edna Golandsky, who was Taubman's principal teaching assistant and associate director of the Institute; and Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky, chair of the Piano Department at the Juilliard School.Besides offering a rational diagnostic system aimed at solving the musical and physiological problems of piano interpretation, the techniques Taubman pioneered have been used therapeutically to treat repetitive strain injuries related to piano playing, and generally to rehabilitate injured pianists. Her techniques have been adapted to computer keyboard typing.
Coordinate Motion Theory
Taubman was best known for her development of a new piano technique called "coordinate motion". Her teaching method springs from a best-practice theoretical model which defines the biomechanical roles and conditions necessary to move efficiently at a musical instrument. These parameters are:- Unification: All the body parts performing work function as a single unit. No single element involved works independently of the unit.
- Mid-Range of Motion: All body parts move within the joint articulation's mid-range of motion from which they depend on. Movements to the extreme range of motion are avoided.
- Awkward Movements: Movement roles are assigned to the body parts best able to perform them to entirely eliminate awkward movements.
- Alignment: Correct alignment of body parts is maintained under all conditions, which allows for skeletal compression, support, and a higher frequency for body parts to move within their mid-range of motion.
- Division of Labor: No single body part performs all the work; work is divided between all the body parts most able to perform it to decrease effort in each muscle group, resulting in an increase of macro-amplitudes overall and a decrease of extra stress at each joint articulation.
- Efficient Use of Equipment: The piano action is used within its limits of design to produce the strongest effect with the least amount of effort required.
- Minimal Muscular Effort: Gravity is used to reduce effort to perform work.
- Synergistic Action: The action of each coordinated movement supports and is supported by other movements. Consequently, the need for each discrete coordinate movement is reduced to minimal levels. With proper coordination, the discrete elements become almost invisible to the untrained eye.
Synergy/Invisibility
Many critics dispute Taubman's notion that forearm rotation is an essential feature of a virtuoso technique, particularly in scale playing. They argue that such a forearm movement would be ungainly, interfere with fast passage work, and make independence of the fingers impossible. Taubman herself was deeply concerned with this question, as she had observed many times in her students that an excessive rotational movement would interfere with speed and control. Yet she paradoxically observed both forearm rotations and the walking arm in virtuoso pianists capable of easily performing any texture, as did her antecedents.Taubman concluded that seemingly discrete technical elements combine synergistically and minimize the need for each, strengthening each individual effect and blends them into a seamless unity that only a trained observer can discern separately. Each technical element must be present in the right timing and amount in order to synergize. For example, in and out movements reduce the need for rotation and walking the arm weight between fingers reduces it further. Shaping reduces the need for in and out, the walking arm, and rotation. Rotation can reduce the need for shaping in many textures. The use of gravity reduces the subjective sense of physical effort in every action, and the need for each discreet technical element. Proper keystroke timing reduces it further still. Both gravity and proper keystroke timing increase the available physical resources needed to produce a large sound, and so on.
While certain textures may take on the predominant visual character of a single technical element if it is called for, the others are still present but minimized. Thus, the true nature of a virtuoso technique becomes invisible to the untrained observer. However, if one of the technical elements is not presented correctly, dysfunction occurs.
Research
Taubman's theory of coordinate motion became the object of a continuing line of scientific inquiry carried on in professional journals, peer-reviewed literature, and conference papers, and influenced the fields of music teaching, medicine, ergonomics, and other related disciplines.The emergence of music medicine as a field of clinical practice is a relatively recent event. As such, the specialty has not yet presented many answers about the fundamental nature of musicians' injuries. For example, musicians experience injuries related to playing an instrument occupationally at a high rate; injuries at the piano have been related to specific technical practices. Both professionals and conservatory students can be affected and musicians' injuries are similar in range and severity to other occupationally induced repetitive strain injurie,. yet orthodox medical approaches do not provide a clear answer yet as to a prime cause; a best-practice model of treatment is still evolving.
H. Micklem began his inquiry into the biomechanical nature of Taubmans' approach in the late 1980s. Pereira collaborated with the Taubman Institute in the mid-1990s and used surface electromyogram studies of Taubman-trained pianists performing various techniques, measuring quantitative changes in muscular activity as techniques changed. During their professional collaboration at the Taubman Institute, both Taubman and Golandsky presented numerous papers and presentations to music medicine conferences covering their theories, methods and outcomes working with injured pianists. Dybvig and Scolnik, both students of Taubman and Golandsky, extended the field of inquiry into Taubman's claims of efficacy and used her methods on people suffering from focal dystonia.
Computer typing
The adaptation and extension of Taubman's approach to computer users showed good to very good clinical outcomes when coupled with a comprehensive, multi-modality case-management approach in an industrial setting. Dempster first outlined a practicable adaptation of Taubman's technical model to the computer keyboard. Dempster's subsequent clinical outcomes suggested that Taubman's approach could in fact be adapted to the computer keyboard successfully with similar clinical outcomes. Using expanded research methods, he showed quantitative changes in the muscular activity of injured legal typists correlated with a decrease in reported symptoms that supported Taubman's original hypothesis that coordinate motion was therapeutic. The approach was corroborated by Griffen and her successful clinical outcomes.An independent case review performed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory using Dempster's training protocol as a study method showed that returns-to-work could be successful over the long-term, which suggests that technique may be causal in repetitive strain injury cases at the computer. Independently, Pascarelli and Kella described a similar taxonomy of technical issues correlated with injuries at the computer keyboard. They concluded, like Taubman, that incorrect technique may be an essential intrinsic risk factor of injury, and that technique retraining should be included in treatment plans for upper extremity RSI sufferers.