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Did Glenn Gould have bad piano technique?
Much has been written about Glenn Gould's technical problems. His journals show that he suffered from pain and dystonia, and struggled mightily to overcome these barriers to the clear expression of his unquestionable musical genius. And he is perhaps even more famous for his unorthodox bench height than his playing. However, to say that Glenn Gould's physical problems were caused by bad technique is ludicrous.
Physically, Gould was extremely well-organized
In the videos you can see his hands are extremely well-organized and his unusual way of using them stems directly from his specific musical intentions. The arch of his hand is relatively flat. He uses virtually exclusively the distal and medial phalanges to move the keys, and refrains from overtly employing the lumbricals to move the proximal phalange. I believe this is one reason I dislike his Berg and Brahms as much as I love his Bach. This use of the hand is ideal for polyphony but just can't cut it for a big Romantic sound. He is capable of "hyper-individuating" each finger and manipulating each key with maximum independence, because he restricts the work of the part of the finger closest to the hand and by extension to the other fingers. He suppresses his use of the hand's main source of rich tone.
If you look closely, however, you'll see that his lumbricals still work well, and that the arch, although lower than usual, is not emptied out. It is still healthy, potent. It is not so collapsed that it evokes forearm tension. It just limits its involvement to a passive, supportive role, so that his polyphonic genius can have full rein. There is no reason to suspect that he is doing anything to evoke tendonitis, dystonia or any other form of performance injury.
What then was the cause of Glenn Gould's performance injuries?
I believe his problems stemmed from a completely different source: an inadvertent form of self-abuse. He actually inflicted a sort of dysfunction on himself in his attempt to reach ultimate control of the keyboard.
I refer of course to his practice of scalding his hands immediately before he performed. In recording sessions he would soak his hands in scalding hot water for 5 minutes, then play for 20, then soak in scalding water another 5, then play for another 20. All his recording sessions went like this from start to finish. He felt he needed to do this to obtain the hyper-looseness needed for absolute, precise control of the key. But...
Scalding his hands achieved relaxation mechanically rather than neurologically.
Had he been able to train his nervous system to bring his musculature to that state, it would have done so in a more sophisticated way. This form of mechanical relaxation made his joints overly loose. Scalding his hands increased the blood circulation to such an extent that his muscles relaxed to the point where they could not keep the 'ball' of each joint snug in its 'socket.' He felt loose and felt he could control the keys as he wished, but overly loose joints were leading to wear and tear elsewhere in the system.
Every joint in our body has a thin layer of sinovial fluid which acts a as lubricant. The two bones of the joint actually need to be slightly compressed into this synovial layer for it to act as a lubricant - just enough for the bones to feel a bit of 'bounce' off that layer. Feldenkrais Method trains the CNS to monitor the snugness of each joint, enabling the muscles to maintain skeletal alignments in the precise geometric configuration to keep things running smoothly. Feldenkrais exercises enable the brain to create a kind of 'neurological soup' that cultivates these precise, vital alignments, instead of the mechanical, 'muscular soup' Gould obtained by scalding his hands.
Thank God that Gould did succeed in leaving us with wonderful recordings - had Feldenkrais Method been around at the time, he might not have had to pay such a high price.
It's too late for Glenn Gould but it's not too late for us to understand the phenomenon and use ourselves accordingly!
Article researched and written for PianoTechnique.org by Alan Fraser
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