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Glenn Gould and Finger Tapping

Richard Beauchamp April. 2005 Many people are aware that Glenn Gould indulged in the arcane practice of finger tapping and that he believed this developed and maintained his amazingly refined and agile finger technique. Sadly, it tends to be placed in the same area in peoples minds as the well known Gould eccentricities, such as the glove and overcoat wearing, the pill taking, the strange and and audible chair he would not do without, the compulsive vocalising etc. etc. That Gould was a genius who suffered from psychiatric disorders possibly some form of Asperger's plus elements of OCD is now generally understood, and it is sad to think that he was denied th e knowledge and understanding that would certainly have been his due had he lived at the present time. The idea for the finger tapping technique apparently came to his first teacher, Alberto Guerrero, while at a Chinese circus. One of the acts featured a three year old boy who performed an astonishingly agile and intricate dance. Guerrero went backstage to find out how it was done and the trainer demonstrated how he moved the childs limbs into the correct positions for the dance while the boy remained passive and relaxed. Later the boy had to reproduce the movements by himself whilst remembering the relaxed and effortless feel. Guerreros adaptation of this technique to the keyboard involved placing the hand in a relaxed way on the keyboard, with the arm hanging loosely, the finger pads resting on the keys, and the second knuckles (PIP joints) as the highest point. The other hand then tapped the individual fingers on the fingertips or the end joint (DIP) down to the keybed, allowing the keys to return the fingers quickly to the surface of the keys. After this, the fingers performed the movements without the help of the other hand but whilst maintaining the same feeling of effortlessness. (This ties in well with what my own teacher, Ernest Empson, told me of Godowski (his teacher)s methods. Godowski told his pupils that the whole hand should remain relaxed in virtuoso fingerwork as though it had fainted and that the fingers were moved by tiny sparks of energy which allowed the fingers to return to the relaxed state instantly. When you listen to recordings of Godowskis lightning leggiero finger work (as in Liszts La Leggierezza for example) this description makes good sense.) It takes only armchair reasoning (to borrow Richard Dawkinss phrase) to understand that learning to perform an action with the

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