Abbey Whiteside

[pianowelsh]

Abbey whiteside US pianist and teacher. She had some very interesting ideas regarding the playing mechanism in relationship to freedom in technique. What do you guys..again particularly US ones know about her and her teaching (even her students - always very revealling) and what do you make of her principles?

[danny elfboy]

Abbey whiteside US pianist and teacher. She had some very interesting ideas regarding the playing mechanism in relationship to freedom in technique. What do you guys..again particularly US ones know about her and her teaching (even her students - always very revealling) and what do you make of her principles?

A great teacher
One of the first to understand the important of body as an holistic whole in piano playing while many people still thought: fixed position, fixed arms, fixed wrist, fixed hands ... just move your fingers by raising them

Her weakness is that she's not very articulate. No offence meant but it's very hard to read her books; for she use complicated words twists to explain rather simple concepts

She the unoficcial inventor of the outlining practicing method
I've seen this method doing miracles for certain students especially those with speed and rhythm mental barriers

Outlining

There's a great book by James Boyk which explain outlining thoroughly as it's the practicing technique he uses with all his students beginners and advanced too

James Boyk - To Hear Ourselves As Others Hear Us

[pianowelsh]

Could you explain the outlining principle in a little more detail. Not much is discussed in relation to this in either of the links.. for the uninititated. Perhaps you could give an example?!?!? Thanks for that on Abbey Whiteside.

[pianoexcellence]

Whiteside's book was the very first pedagogy book I used when studying for my exams...
Probably not the best way to start!!

I definitely agree that her comunication style leaves a lot to be desired.  I found her approach was more of a reaction to her current methods, than a true pedagogy book.

There were some things that I found wonderful for my students
--Rhythmic pulsing (playing only the strong beats in each measure) to begin, then filling in the less strong beats with small muscle movements.
--The concept of the blended action, rather than sole reliance on finger action.
--The concept of a core central rhythm

Others I found frightful..
--her idea that a basic rhythm will overcome all technical difficulties
--Her disavowal of slow practice
--Her overcompensation away from a legitimate finger action.
--Her thoughts on body movement, although sincere, might lead to mannerisms in students if left unchecked.
This of course is just my opinion, and this is what is helpful with my personal teaching style.

[pianowelsh]

I agree with you on the pros and cons. Thats the danger of setting things down in books. As a teacher you are always watchfull and monitoring the students but when you put a principle down in a book you cant second guess that someone else will do the same.  To be honest im not sure about the fundamental rhythm theory in relation to difficulties... I never totally understood what she was getting at. I can see that when I play a difficult passage slowly with a very clear and distinct sense of the underlying pulse it is easy and as i gradually build up the temp I latch onto that underlying pulse as the constant - like an anchor.. maybe this is what she is getting  at - I find this works.   I strongly agree with her attituds to slow practice but as you say when you are forced down a route and you discover a new way the bathwater does tend to get thrown out wholesale baby and all!

[danny elfboy]

I wanted to add that the Whiteside foundation website is even better in briefly explaining the Whiteside principles than Whiteside books themselves. The author is Sophia Rosoff, a student of Whiteside but who seems to have "surpassed the master" in explaining those principles:

Whiteside's Life and Technique

Here are concepts from the site that I find beautifully explained:

Abby Whiteside taught that performance and learning equally benefit from an approach that trains us from the center to periphery - i.e. the center of our bodies, our torso, to the periphery - our fingers, never the other way around.


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Put a rhythm in your body and keep it going." It is rhythm that makes the difference between phrasewise listening and notewise listening. With notewise listening there is little chance for an emotional rhythm because our focus is on the smallest common denominator. With phrasewise listening rhythm is the governing factor. We hear the hills and valleys in a succession of notes pertaining to rhythmic stresses.


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The synchronization of the push-offs with the music, which creates the follow-through activity that brings about the swaying and pleasure in skating should be the same, not different, for the pianist.


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A lesson - every lesson - was, for Abby Whiteside, an exciting and creative experience.
A lesson was a fundamental opportunity to transfer to the student the awareness of how it felt to play with a rhythm. For this purpose she used imagery, physical handling, and anything which suggested itself to her. Students twirled knobs - imaginary and real - to get an active rotary action and general aliveness of the arms. They snapped imaginary whips to learn how the upper arm controlled the actions of the forearm and hand, or held lightly a piece of paper or imagined holding a baby bird to make the palms alive for playing - transmitting the power of the arm. This meant that the student could learn something at a lesson which improved his playing even if they had not practiced all week.


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Her primary mechanism was to listen for musical enjoyment. She did no coaching, but when her listening for musical enjoyment was interrupted by notewise playing, or for any other reason which made the student play without a subtle and pliant continuity, she would immediately stop them so that they could work on the problem. She would be apologetic about the interruption, but was certain that a fault would be easier to correct if one worked at it while the impression was fresh


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She constantly stressed the necessity of being emotionally involved in practicing a performance. Early in her career she learned that the human body is so constituted that the physical coordination used when one is emotionally involved in a performance is different from one operating when one is not.


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For whatever reason the tendency in both teachers and students of music is to not trust rhythm first and foremost. We are taught to sweat and fuss, to lifelessly drill our fingers for development of power. And never are we taught that rhythm - that which makes music musical can be our primary means for learning.


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Many pianists and other instrumentalists suffer from various forms of tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome and other disorders of the wrists and fingers. Many of these injuries are likely formed by a distorted over use of one particular muscle group. The Whiteside approach, since it encourages use of the body as a whole and the rhythmic distribution of the initiation of power across multiple muscle groups, from center to periphery, tends to solve injuries automatically. Again, rhythm works its magic.


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Can Abby Whiteside's principle of learning with a rhythm be applied to other musical instruments, or perhaps to virtuosity in sports, or even academic learning? Indeed, Abby Whiteside herself felt that rhythm is the governing force behind any beautiful performance be it on a musical instrument or on an ice rink. Wherever learning or performing involves coping with a mass of detail (individual notes in the case of music, minute individual movements in the case of dance, or individual concepts in the case of academic learning), we might consider that it is rhythm that allows us to digest, deliver, and gracefully manage these details in more fluently handled packets, or phrases.


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Imagine watching someone who has the task of moving a huge collection of baseballs from one side of a field to another and they are picking up and carrying one baseball at a time, coming back and doing it again. It would be frustrating just to watch them do it. Now imagine if that same person were given a large, flat paddle which they could use to whack the balls, several at a time, across the field. The process would become both fun and efficient. And each individual ball, though still making its own separate journey across the field, would travel in a group driven by a singular momentum, a momentum initiated by a more wholly engaged body. That paddle, or rather our capacity to use it, is part of the magical trick behind fluent learning that Abby Whiteside had dedicated her life to uncovering.


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Music is not details, but movement. It is a whole going somewhere. If the movement is beautiful, the details adds charm. If the movement is stilted or choked, then the most skilfully executed detail will be meaningless. And the irony is that if there is real movement, momentum, rhythm, moving irresistibly forward, if there is an overall sense of rhythm, the details cannot help but be pulled into this greater movement and will come out right. So can you persuade yourself to let go of the fear of being wrong to give the right a chance to take you unawares?


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Rhythm is the core of the blended activity of the entire playing mechanism.
In this respect, Abby praised jazz artists who experience their music more directly (having "tune in their ears and a rhythm in their bodies") than do classical artists.


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We respond to music through movement, obvious or subtle, in the torso, in the legs, in the arms, not just in the fingers - the whole organism is involved. In cultures which are less emotionally repressive than the Western culture in which the piano is most often played, this is so obvious that it doesn't need to be stated. A musical response which involves only the brain can barely be called a musical response at all. Music is movement, life, a physical sense of rhythm, an emotional response. This is why it is dangerous to first approach rhythm by teaching people to count. Counting in an intellectual activity. Rhythm is not intellectual, but physical

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Thus trying to create a completely independent finger technique is inhibitive to a unified expression of a musical phrase, and only encourages what she called 'note-wise procedure' - conceiving music as a sequence of unconnected pitches rather than as a whole.


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I think Whiteside is still misunderstood and expecially in this chat underestimated.
She is a genius for putting art back where art belongs.
Slowly we have robbed piano playing of its artistic side focusing on intellectualizing rather than listening, focusing on dull exercises rather than body sensations, focusing on the fingers rather than the whole body and eventually focusing on stern stillness rather than passional involvement. And the bad aspect of this is that removing passion, kinestethic, feelings, childlike creativity and intense listening to focus on dry accademicism and obsolete sternness didn't make the solving of technical problems at the instrument easier but actually not only made it harder but added new problems and difficulties that are just byproducts of the flawed artistic and pedagogical approach.

I have always said that art and creativity eludes the patterns of the down on earth world and reject cynicism, materialism, fear and caution instead of risks. It must be felt passionally and emotions and passions must be left free to express themselves.
And since we live in a society that is emotionally repressive, introvert, inhibited and bigoted the true artist needs to let go of such oppressive burden and dishinibit totally the creative flow and in doing so it indeed opposes and counters the "materialist" western system we may found so spread in other matters. Indeed the artist is the person who doesn't content with just SURVIVING but needs LIVING, in fact the one who seeks LIVING even at the expense of surviving.

Whiteside realized that such visceral passion and feeling of the music through your whole body doesn't have to be the end of just few real artists but can be the "mean" of many many students.

Whiteside also brought to music a forgotten and vital life principle: wholeness.
I've realized that whatever field from philosophy, sociology, culture, relationships to nutrition, medicine, history, politics needs an holistic approach and perspective and that the reductionist approach is always flawed, incomplete and confused.

[landru]

Wonderful quotes here! I was particularly struck by this one:

Put a rhythm in your body and keep it going." It is rhythm that makes the difference between phrasewise listening and notewise listening. With notewise listening there is little chance for an emotional rhythm because our focus is on the smallest common denominator. With phrasewise listening rhythm is the governing factor. We hear the hills and valleys in a succession of notes pertaining to rhythmic stresses.

I just experienced this myself while re-visiting Bach's Invention No. 1 (BTW I am a beginner/intermediate with a lot of holes in my technique/interpretation). I had learned it as one of my first "real pieces" almost a year ago. It was so early on that I basically learned it as a sequence of notes - like the "notewise" listening in the quote above, and by counting (i.e. 1234 1234 1234 etc.)

I went back to the Invention this week, and to polish up some bits I put on the metronome on the 8th beats - which I hadn't done before. Oh my God - just this fact let me feel the dance-like rhythm that I now hear in the piece - which had totally passed me by before. Hearing and feeling the rhthym totally changed my playing of the piece. My counting and notewise learning didn't allow me to feel the rhythmic backbone.

I think it is telling that a lot of classical music's forms come from the dance - from the motion of the body. Bach's partitas, Chopin's mazurkas and waltzes, Schubert's landler all come out of dances. Let the rhythm of the body lead and the head and fingers will follow!