Gould, Guerrero and the Legacy of Finger Tapping

Gould, Guerrero and the Legacy of Finger Tapping 

“One does not play the piano with one’s fingers, one plays the piano with one’s mind”

—Glenn Gould.

Glenn Herbert Gould © Fred Plat/Sony Music Entertainment

Glenn Gould’s obituary in the New York Times was full of veiled superlatives. Edward Rothstein described the deceased as an ‘always unorthodox pianist’ who chose ‘isolation over society…and idiosyncratic reinterpretations over respect for musical “authenticity.”’ By then, the mythology around Gould’s eccentricities — ‘wearing gloves, scarf and overcoat in summer weather; soaking his hands in hot water before playing the piano and humming and singing while playing’ — had been cemented into musical folklore. But beyond these idiosyncrasies, Gould would be remembered as a pianist with ‘a technique that knew no difficulties,’ who could ‘dissect a work, cleanse it of its standard interpretive manners and restore it to an almost ecstatic excitement.’ [1]

Gould’s debut recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1955) was recorded at the age of only 22 and documented an already fully-formed artist who possessed flawless technique and an aesthetic concept of polyphonic clarity that characterised much of the rest of the century. Seemingly, he had come from nowhere. Indeed, Another one of Gould’s peculiarities was his lack of origin story; as Rothstein wrote in his obituary, ‘Mr. Gould himself seemed to grow out of no particular musical tradition.’ [2] We might uncover the mysteries surrounding Gould’s backstory by exploring his pedagogical upbringing through his teachers, of which there were only two; his mother Florence, and the Chilean-Canadian pianist Alberto Garcia Guerrero, the latter of which seemed to have a more marked influence on his technique and individuality as a musician. 

In his biography of Guerrero, John Beckwith has retraced his long career as virtuoso recitalist, chamber music collaborator, concerto soloist, and more crucially, as teacher. Guerrero’s shadowy presence in anglophone literature was in part due to the pianist’s own reluctance to speak about himself or his work; he once exclaimed to ‘have no story.’ [3] However, born in 1886 in La Serena, Guerrero remained in his native Chile until the age of thirty two, emerging in his homeland as a critical figure in intellectual and musical life, and performed and taught throughout the length and breadth of of the country. Although creative life in Chile was flowering, Canada offered, amongst other things, a more stable political climate free from the civil outbursts, frontier clashes, and dictatorial regimes that had characterised life in Chile during the War of the Pacific (1879-83) and the Chilean Civil War (1891). [4]

Following a series of successful concerts throughout North America between 1916-18, Guerrero moved to Canada to teach in the Hambourg Conservatory in Toronto, eventually joining the faculty of the Toronto Conservatory of Music in 1922. In 1943, Guerrero was asked to audition an eleven-year old wunderkind by the name of Glenn Gould, whom he enthusiastically taught for the next nine years. While Gould was later dismissive of his teacher's influence and abilities, referring to him not by name but only as ‘my teacher’, recent scholarship has stressed the importance of Guerrero’s early guidance. In Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, Kevin Bazzana has emphasised how Guerrero was quite taken with prodigious student, and vice versa; Bazzana even discovered a doodle in one of Gould’s grade-school notebooks, in which a large capital “G” joins together three names: Gould, Guerrero and Greig (Gould was in fact a distant relative of Edvard Grieg.) [5]

A younger Glenn Gould with his teacher, Albert Guerrero, c. 1945

Both teacher and student shared an interest in what was then unusual repertoire; Scriabin, Ravel, Schoenberg, the early English Virginalists and more obviously Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which were then very much outside of the traditional piano repertoire. They also both paid great attention to clarity and voice-leading, held an interest in broadcast recitals, and displayed a somewhat curious posture at the piano. Most importantly, perhaps, was the development of Gould’s technical fluency and acumen under Guerrero’s method; as Margaret Sheppard Privitello wrote, ‘it has to be obvious to anyone who is not wearing blinders that Glenn learned his technical skills from Guerrero.’ [6] The technical invention passed on to Gould — as well as most of Guerrero’s other pupils, many of whom are still alive — was known as finger tapping.

Although Gould later claimed to practice very little, his early years were spent diligently applying the finger tapping method; a series of candid photos in 1956 shows Gould with one hand poised over the other, engaged in finger-tapping practice. In a scene from Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, Gould’s friend and fellow Guerrero student, Ruth Watson Henderson, describes the technique in depth: ‘The tapping that Guerrero taught us to do was to gain independence of the fingers. There’s no lifting of fingers, so by tapping you get the feeling of pressure at the tip of the finger, but the finger bounces back, by itself…we all learnt this detached finger technique from Guerrero, but Glenn just had such marvellous technique that he was able to ring it off no matter what he played.’ [7]

Guerrero himself developed the technique from Otto Ortmann’s The Physiological Mechanics of Piano Technique (1929) in which, as Ruth Henderson puts it, ‘The student placed one hand on the keys, with fingers over the required notes, then used a finger of the other hand to push on the first knuckle of the first hand with the pressure needed to produce the sound.’ [8] In anatomical terms, the arm hangs loose with the fingertips resting on the desired keys, with the second knuckles (PIP/proximal interphalangeal joints) elevated. The other hand then taps the each fingertip fingertips on the end joint (DIP/distal interphalangeal joints) down to the bed of the keyboard, then allows the keys to return their original position with minimal movement of the finger. Eventually, the targeted fingers perform the same movements, this time without assistance from the other hand, in a slow staccato retaining the same feeling of effortlessness.

The key point is that tapping the finger forces it to mimic the coordination that would be caused by using the intrinsic muscles of the hand (i.e. the interossei and lumbricals)  by making the finger flex at the three joints of the knuckle which can act independently of each other and work at great speed. Alternatively, using the forearm flexors (the flexor digitorum profundus and flexor digitorum superficialis, in particular) results in a stiff hand because of their tendency to make the fingers work together as a unit. These muscles are also less sensitive for tone control and speed than are the muscles in the hand because, due to simple mechanics, they are so far away from the levers which they operate.

This anatomical understanding of the body and hands can be taken further; Gould was inherently preoccupied with the relationship between the mind and the tactile experience of playing the piano. His psychological state was predisposed to see a profound connection with the hand as a physical extension of the body rather than something external to it. Gould was a well-known hypochondriac with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and some have suggested he may have been autistic, although this last proposition is uncertain. In recording sessions he was known to have soaked his hands in (near) scalding water for 5 minutes, then play for 20, repeating the process until the recording was finished, a mechanical way of obtaining the hyper-looseness desired to eradicate tension and gain total control over the keyboard. The connection between the mind, body and hands through finger tapping, I would suggest, may have been part of a much larger routine of rituals and obsessions which made Glenn, at least towards the end of his life, an extremely difficult and troublesome person to be close to.

Glenn Gould, genius. © Gordon Parks/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Gould’s choice of piano also had a profound influence his technical approach. After his first Steinway CD174 was damaged irreparably in transit in 1957, he acquired its replacement in the form of a ‘pre-World War II piano which answers to CD318.’ [9] Gould felt devoted to the instrument and regularly overhauled its mechanics in order to bring the hammers closer to the strings, making passages of leggerio finger work even more effortless. Indeed, before acquiring the CD318 Gould used to fit his old Steinway with steel T-pins to create what he called a ‘harpsi-piano,’ a ‘neurotic piano that thinks its a harpsichord.’ [10] The CD318 was eventually damaged as well in 1971, and Gould’s final recordings were made on a Yamaha CFII in New York. Fortunately, the CD318 has been restored and is on permanent display at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and is regularly performed on.

In 1953, Glenn’s father, Bert, had customised a light-weight, wooden folding chair which gave Glenn a famously low seating at the piano; he never performed on anything else throughout his career and, when asked if he thought the chair had been as close a companion to him as Bach had been, he responded with ‘much closer, actually.’ [11] Here, once again, Gould’s personalised ergonomics of piano playing seem to have been handed down to him from Guerrero; he also sat low at the keyboard, attacked the keys with a low wrist and (occasionally) flat fingers, and supported his arms from the shoulder blades. To an interviewer who commented on his crouched-over position at the piano, Gould said ‘that’s the way my teacher taught me, and I can’t change now. My teacher’s the biggest hunchback in Canada.’ [12]

[1] Edward Rothstein, “GLENN GOULD, PIANIST, IS DEAD; SAW RECORDINGS AS ART FORM”, The New York Times, Oct. 5, 1982.

[2] Ibid. 

[3] John Beckwith, In Search of Alberto Guerrero, (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), xv.

[4] Ibid., 1-29. 

[5] Kevin Bazzzan, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, (Oxford University Press, 2004), 400.

[6] John Beckwith, In Search of Alberto Guerrero, 100.

[7] Genius Within: the Inner Life of Glenn Gould, directed by Michèle Hozer, Peter Raymont, (White Pine Pictures, 2009).

[8] Ibid. 

[9] Ronald V. Ratcliffe, Steinway & Sons, (Chronicle Books, 2002), 140.

[10] Kevin Bazzzan, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, 209.

[11] Glenn Gould: la retraite, directed by Bruno Monsaingeon (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 1968).

[12] Glenn Gould, interview with Martin Mayer, cited in Otto Friedrich, Glenn Gould:
A Life and Variations (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989), 51.