soul was the chief operator of this system. In her view, fingers are almost useless as agents of either direction or force. Although 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 maneuvering any finger into the optimum position such that a simple downward arm movement is required to sound a note. Thus "weak" fingers (i.e., the fourth finger) are not weak if they are driven by the force of the arm, and exercises to develop their "strength" are a waste of time. More than even the arm, however, Whiteside advocated the concept of a basic rhythm—a somewhat specialized 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 the 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." Whiteside's sense of muscular use is partly along the lines of the Alexander technique; perhaps the best-known and best-formalized modern school was founded by Dorothy Taubman. (Taubman's method is now being carried forward by the Golandsky Institute.) Criticism In spite of the remarkable results Whiteside achieved with her own pupils (many of whom were far from promising when beginning