Abby Whiteside
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Abby Whiteside (1881-1956) was an influential and controversial piano teacher whose ideas are still much debated. She challenged the finger-centric approach of much Classical piano teaching and instead advocated a holistic attitude in which the arm is the conductor of a musical image conceived first in the mind.
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[edit] Life
She was born in Vermillion, South Dakota and majored in music at the University of South Dakota. After a period spent teaching at the University of Oregon, she studied in Germany with Rudolf Ganz. On returning to the USA and teaching first in Oregon, then New York, she slowly developed the ideas for which she became known.
[edit] Works
Abby Whiteside's ideas are set forth in two short books.
- The Indispensables of Piano Playing (1955)
- Mastering the Chopin Etudes and other Essays (published posthumously in 1969)
After some years of being out of print, these were republished in a single volume, Abbey Whiteside On Piano Playing, in 1997.
[edit] Ideas
The catalyst for the development of Whiteside's philosophy was the realisation that, in her own words 'The pupils in my studio played or didn't play, and that was that. The talented ones progressed, the others didn't - and I could do nothing about it.'
Whiteside praised the natural ability of the child prodigy and the jazz pianist, and sought to understand how an untutored technique could be capable of virtuosity.
In her view, fingers are almost useless as agents of either direction or force. Whilst they might be tutored with much patience to achieve a certain level of dexterity, they possess only limited strength and movement. Indeed, the fourth finger in particular possesses very little of either.
Instead, Whiteside advocated the use of the humerus as the principal force for producing a tone at the piano - the shoulder joint, being simultaneously powerful and subtle, is more than capable of doing all the work of any individual finger, and moreover is capable of manoeuvering any finger into the optimum position such that a simple downward arm movement is required to sound a note. Thus 'weak' fingers such as the fourth finger are not weak if they are driven by the force of the arm, and exercises to develop their 'strength' are a total waste of time.
More than even the arm, however, Whiteside advocated the concept of a basic rhythm - a somewhat specialised term in her writings which indicated an innate sense of phrasing present in all but the most unmusical humans. This rhythm informs every action involved in producing a musical phrase, with the torso, humerus, forearm, wrist and fingers forming a single mechanism to express it. 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.
Whiteside considered the Chopin Études to be the exact point at which a finger-based technique broke down - only a technique which used the arm to direct the phrases conceived in the brain could even approach them. She was utterly dismissive of the exercises of Czerny and Hanon, writing:
'Hanon is used for developing independent fingers with equal hitting power. Obviously this cannot be accomplished. Each finger may gain more power, but there will still be inequality in the fingers. Fingers need to be only expert in transmitting the power of the arm.' (From the essay 'Flaws in Traditional Teaching of the Piano').
[edit] Controversy
In spite of the remarkable results Whiteside achieved with her own pupils, many of whom were far from promising when beginning lessons with her, her ideas are still not widely accepted. A technique based on independence of the fingers continues to be widely taught - whilst the notion is now widespread that an effective arm technique is essential to fluent playing and avoiding repetitive strain injury, few teachers have been willing to entirely abandon the concept of finger drilling.
Some modern techniques do have substantial similarities with Whiteside's - the Taubman Method is perhaps the best-known and best-formalised,
Critics have pointed out that only one of her pupils, Robert Helps became known as a concert virtuoso, and even her admirers admit that her case is not helped by the inadequacies of her prose style - it has been described as convoluted, unclear, repetitious and poorly structured.
Nevertheless, testimonials from adult learners who have read her books are widespread - a recurring theme is that the very same Chopin Études on which she based so much of her teaching had been a stumbling-block until her methods were applied.
[edit] Legacy
In addition to the above mentioned Robert Helps, two of Whiteside's pupils became noted teachers in their own right, Joseph Prostakoff and Sophia Rosoff, and continued to apply her methods. The former taught the noted Jazz pianist and educator Barry Harris, whilst Rosoff taught the jazz pianists Fred Hersch and Ethan Iverson. Whiteside also tutored two major composers, Morton Gould and Vivian Fine.
In the late 1950s, Sophia Rosoff set up the Abby Whiteside Foundation, an organisation dedicated to promote her ideas, train teachers and performers and organise recitals by pianists trained in Whiteside's methods.
