TAUBMAN, yes perfect example!!! aim the fingers where needed, and wrists/forarms and shoulders lift your hands, hands are under gravitational force downward of -9.8 m/s 2 (the acceleration of gravity)
Hands muscles are only really used for thumb movement and grasping, stretching motions for large chords, etc,,,
on the strike though your whole arms and (upper body, some even say whole body...to an extent) acts as a shock absorber...more shock absorbment needs to happen..when you get up to fortissimo and all that..
Sorry to be blunt, but objectively speaking this a load of old bull. There are some practically useful idea in Taubman, but taken at face value it is VERY misleading. Firstly, the arm is sort of a shock absorber, but it's the thumb and finger that play the biggest role in shock absorption. If they don't move, the arm provides mass for shock, not absorption- regardless of whether you brace or allow them to collapse. If the fingers time movement well, they send momentum away from impact however (and transmit energy with phenomenal efficiency- which reduces the need to throw the mass of your arm crashing down into every individual octaves).
In particular, the idea that gravity provides all the motion is ludicrous. Throw a hand up in the air and relax your arm. Watch just how slow it is to reverse direction at the top and how long it takes before it reaches a good speed on descent. In octaves, there is neither the time available between sounds nor adequate acceleration available from the necessary concise movement. Gravity doesn't generate enough speed in such a short distance of movement. Acceleration may be 9.81 m/s2 but the starter speed is zero. It takes time and distance of a fall to hit a large velocity. Neither is available in fast octaves and anyone who gets lost in this concept as an end in itself will fight an impossible battle.
For anyone who's interested, this post provides a simple practical illustration of how fundamentally essential it is to generate movement from the hand when playing octaves:
https://pianoscience.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/introduction-to-three-core-posts-on.htmlI've recently discovered that the Liszt 6th rhapsody becomes possible without seizing up, if you get proper movement (rather than collapse or bracing) in the hand. Taubman can trigger this indirectly, but if you miss it, all the stuff about gravity leads nowhere. Frankly, their advice on octaves is pretty bog-standard stuff that virtually everyone has been saying for years. I'm not sure why some people think it's anything radical or remarkable- especially as they scarcely mention the single most important element in the mechanism. Without finger movement, octaves are a non starter.
One of the most important exercises is to drift slowly up with the wrist and to lengthen out the finger and thumb to lightly produce the octave. It involves minimal impact, because the arm is not crashing down. You can gradually build up to a healthy forte without any down from the arm. Only once the fingers can produce movement in this way does it also become possible to come down from above with the same lack of impact. Taubman starts from the end most likely to cause impact- and you see one hell of an impact when Golandsky demonstrates this on the film! I've rarely seen such a thud. Nothing like how Rubinstein could absorb the impact on landing- thanks to actually generating movement in his hand, rather than letting flop down lifelessly. It's far easier to start from down to up and then reverse it later.
Topic: How the heck do you freaking play fast octaves?!