Abby Whiteside dedicated her life to finding truly reliable solutions to the problems of learning to play the piano, and hence to learning in general. During her seventy-six years she relentlessly pursued and acquired a profound awareness of the physical basis for a performance that is beautiful, moving, and technically fluent. Her search began the day she accepted the inadequacy of the generally accepted teaching methods. In her preface to Indispensables of Piano Playing she wrote: "Teaching has been an exciting experience since I squarely faced the unpleasant fact, more than twenty five years ago, that the pupils in my studio either played or didn't play, and that was that. The talented ones progressed, the others didn't - and I could do nothing about it."

Once started this search never stopped; it was difficult, full of zigzags, and required remarkable tenacity. One of her lifelong convictions was that the fundamental way of learning, of achieving piano mastery, was the same for the very gifted, the less gifted, and even ungifted students. If a suggested coordination was close enough to the truth, the gifted would bridge the gap, but the less gifted might very well be hampered. As a result, she discarded any diagnosis, no matter how effective it was with some students, if it did not consistently help all of them improve.

Abby Whiteside's own musical training and general education had been of a fairly conventional nature. We know of nothing there that could have been responsible for so firing up her imagination; she must have been born with the restless and relentlessly inquiring mind which ultimately led her so far from the concepts which are still widely and unquestioningly accepted by pianists and teachers. She was born in 1881 in Vermillion, South Dakota, majored in music at the University of South Dakota and graduated with highest honors. After several years of teaching at the University of Oregon, she went to Germany, to study with Rudolf Ganz. Then she returned to the United States and became a very successful teacher, first in Oregon, then in New York, where she taught for the rest of her life, and took summers to teach and lecture nationally.