Choreography of the Hands: The Work of Dorothy Taubman

The complete, authorized version of Choreography of the Hands: The Work of Dorothy Taubman, with a forward by its creator Ernest Urvator:

I first met Dorothy more than sixty-six years ago when I was barely twenty years old.  My fiancé Muriel, a splendid pianist and Dorothy’s first disciple (her “Edna,” before there was Edna), schlepped me along to one of Dorothy’s regular monthly recitals in Dorothy’s Brooklyn apartment, where pianists, many of them studying in the music department at Queens College, would display their chops.  Those evenings were…well, heavenly.

Years later, after getting a Ph.D. in physics, after teaching for eight years at Colorado State University, and after returning to the east, I ran into Dorothy again at her summer institute at Amherst College. After attending several days of her workshops, watching her master classes, and listening to Edna’s lectures, I decided that it would be a crime not to capture these events on film.  Trouble was, I wasn’t a filmmaker. It took me three tries, in three separate summers, to produce something I wasn’t ashamed of, thanks in large part to Jim MacAllister, who directed my third shoot. His experience had been in medical television at Boston’s world-famous Beth Israel hospital and he was very appreciative of what she was doing with injured musicians. Dorothy made me a filmmaker.  Choreography of the Hands:  The Work of Dorothy Taubman was my first, mastered on 1” videotape, and created several years before wide screens and the digital age.

Pianists, music departments, and libraries all over the world have acquired copies of Choreography. Uploaded on YouTube eight years ago, it has had 126,000 hits--not bad as long as you don’t compare it to Taylor Swift’s We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, uploaded the same year, which has 613,663,243 views as of this writing.