After waiting months, my copy of the book The Taubman Approach to Piano Technique by Edna Golandsky has finally shipped and I can't wait to read it! I understand that, as with many piano topics, the Taubman approach has its fans and its haters. When I first started piano a year ago, I got really overwhelmed and confused (and, admittedly, a little annoyed!) by the advice dynamic on the forums. I thought to myself, "Who are these internet piano strangers, and why are they so invested in giving me 9,999 pieces of conflicting advice?"
It took me all this time to learn that getting conflicting advice on the boards can actually be AWESOME (edit: as long as you can easily identify when the advice is wrong for you and ignore it) because brains are different, bodies are different, learning styles are different, and pianists have been arguing piano topics since the 1700s! Piano wars are a tradition, part of what we signed up for when we decided to 1) learn the piano and 2) join in community with human beings with all KINDS of abilities, feelings, hopes, and dreams.
So, this is both an invitation to read this book with me over the next month, and a mea culpa. I care so much about learning the piano that I have, at times, gotten stompy, defensive, insecure, and opinionated. How embarrassing! For the greater part, and, especially at PianoTell, people are just trying to help, and that's amazing!!!
Yes, it's good to NOT overwhelm one's self with firehose learning! I'm guilty of that learning style! But I will not say I'm sorry for being a passionate, determined, "try-hard" book nerd! There is nothing wrong with striving to build skills. We fall down! We get up again! That's part of the deal too. Piano includes volunteering to do homework, every day, as a lifestyle. That's crazy, right? I think it's a little bit crazy, but gosh, I love piano people!
Back to Taubman.
Thank you to everyone who recently weighed in on the subject of pain-free technique. I bought an advance copy of The Taubman Approach to Piano Technique to continue my investigations into this fascinating topic. I've noticed that piano playing is easier (and not painful!) when I spend a little time figuring out what finger, hand, arm, shoulder, and torso motions will help me navigate a new piece. I almost said, "Even at my level," but I think that's wrong for me. I want to learn it at my level, right now, because I'm not naturally good at any of this.
Multitasking and body-part independence is really hard for me. It's easier for me personally to learn physical technique in Alfred 1 with easier pieces than it will be later when I'm completely over my head with a much more difficult array of stuff to learn. I just know studying the parachute drop in a piece with 3 flats is going to make me crazy.
Those of you who have been learning since you were children might not even realize how much you learned about relaxation, flexibility, rotation, good key attack etc. when you were 5. I think adult learning tends to leave out those early, possibly invisible-to-children teachings, then we hit a brick wall and we don't know why, and someone tells us we've developed a million bad habits, and now at Level 6 (or whenever) we have to actually start building a more functional set of gestures. I guess adult- oriented teaching assumes we're too impatient to learn how to use our body from the beginning?
More experienced people, I invite you to make more suggestions, contradictions, corrections! The only two things I really know is that I know 1) nothing at all, except 2) how to make mistakes, recover from them, and learn. I 100% can learn!
