{"id":2558,"date":"2015-08-29T09:00:28","date_gmt":"2015-08-29T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=2558"},"modified":"2020-08-31T11:03:31","modified_gmt":"2020-08-31T18:03:31","slug":"the-fifth-finger-an-appreciation-of-the-little-finger-in-right-hand-technique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/the-fifth-finger-an-appreciation-of-the-little-finger-in-right-hand-technique\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fifth Finger: An Appreciation of the Little Finger in Right-Hand Classical Guitar Technique"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Colin Cooper<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strictly speaking, the thumb is not a finger. It is a digit, one of the five, but different in that it moves in an opposite direction to the four fingers, enabling the hand to perform acts that other animals cannot. For the purpose of this article, the phrase \u201cfive fingers\u201d will be used, expressing as it does the whole handful: four fingers and a thumb. Here is Turibio Santos, talking to Andy Summers: \u201cIt was at a house in Paris. Segovia was playing to a small group, and Tomas Teran, his friend the pianist, brought Villa-Lobos to present to Segovia, <\/strong>and said, \u2018Have you met Villa-Lobos, the composer from Brazil?\u2019 Segovia replied, \u2018Yes. Miguel Llobet showed me one valse that he did. He doesn\u2019t understand the guitar very well because he asks you to make a very big stretch with the fingers of the left hand, and he asks you to put the small finger to make chords with five notes.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Five<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Villa-Lobos had taught himself to play the guitar as a child\u2014secretly, because his mother, who thought him destined for greater things, had denied him access to the piano. It did not occur to him not <\/em>to use the little finger of his right hand when he had to pluck five strings. It must have been a surprise to him when he discovered that virtually all the word\u2019s classical guitarists used only four of their right hand\u2019s five digits. Ricardo Iznaola has been interested in the possible use of the fifth finger for many years. Two pieces\u2014\u201cTwo Circus Vignettes\u201d\u2014 by him appear in Charles Postlewate\u2019s Contemporary Anthology of<\/em> Solo Guitar Music for Five Fingers of the Right<\/em> Hand <\/em><\/a>(Mel Bay); they are entirely original and conceived for five fingers. And In Appendix B of Iznaola\u2019s book Kitharologus: The Path to Virtuosity<\/em><\/a>, the author \u201cprovides some pointers for extending the technique presented in the book to the five finger approach.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heitor Villa-Lobos<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The idea of incorporating the fifth finger into guitar technique is not new. Dionisio Aguado is known to have advocated it, and is said to have written some studies for it. And Domingo Prat, who studied with Miguel Llobet and taught Maria Luisa Anido, wrote a technical booklet, which Iznaola studied in his youth and which incorporates the fifth finger in scales and arpeggios. Villa-Lobos is also known for having used the technique. Ricardo Iznaola told me that he finds the most creative use of the little finger in the arrangements of Kazuhito Yamashita (\u201cthat immense talent\u201d), and other players use it from time to time in particular instances, such as artificial harmonics and rasgueados. Iznaola himself has used it sporadically for certain chordal textures, apart from the occasional rasgueado. He does not, however, consider himself to be a specialist, despite his contributions to Charles Postlewate\u2019s Contemporary Anthology<\/em>. He said: \u201cWhen asked by Postlewate to write some pieces, I had as my main purpose to write music that would be almost impossible to play except than by the use of the five fingers. Of the two pieces I contributed, the first fully follows this premise: it is not possible without the little finger. The second may be played with four fingers, but it would be very awkward. However, I was stumped to finish the request [four pieces had been asked for] because there are very few textures on the guitar, in my experience, that could not be accomplished with four fingers. Of course, the obvious one is a five-finger tremolo, apart from five and six-voice chords.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As to whether there is going to come a day when the fifth finger becomes an indispensable weapon in the guitarist\u2019s arsenal, Ricardo certainly thinks that it \u201cprovides some alternatives that, with proper training, can open the door to the imagination of composers and players to find novel, artistically attractive textures and sonorities.\u201d However, he argues, unless composers find a truly innovative and rich content that makes the use of the fifth finger indispensable, why bother? This surely makes sense. History shows that an instrumental technique is developed to meet the demands of the composer, not the reverse. You do not develop a technique and then look for someone to compose music for it. One thinks of Beethoven\u2019s reply to a violinist who complained that his part in a late string quartet was unplayable on the violin: \u201cWhat do I care for your damned fiddle?\u201d Once violinists realized that the music was worth playing, they set about extending their techniques. I suspect that, notwithstanding the enthusiasm, dedication, and sheer hard work of pioneers like Charles Postlewate, it will not be until some really unmissable music appears that positively requires<\/em> the fifth finger, that the guitar world will begin the serious work of regarding the smallest finger as a digit of equal importance. After all, keyboard players soon managed to use their thumbs when music of the caliber of J.S. Bach\u2019s appeared on the scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wolf Moser is another who became intrigued by the possibilities. He found it difficult to create true independence between the ring finger and the fifth finger (there are physiological reasons for this): \u201cThey just wouldn\u2019t come apart. I had played all my life with my ring finger going the same way as the little finger.\u201d Having decided that fifth finger technique was something worth learning, he devised exercises that included holding down the first three fingers on the table and then pulling down the little finger\u2014though always mindful of the damage that Schumann did to his hands through applying exterior force instead of encouraging his fingers to develop independent strength.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s actually a good thing to use the fifth finger,\u201d Moser says. \u201cWhy shouldn\u2019t we use this 20 percent? Why only 80 percent of the fingers? Once you get it going, it\u2019s more agile than the ring finger.\u201d It is only long use that gives the impression that the fourth (ring) finger is stronger than the fifth. A close look at any competent pianist will demonstrate how important this tiniest digit is to their techniques; string players, too, including harpists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The leading pioneer of the fifth finger in contemporary guitar is Postlewate. His three-part, five-finger series, \u201cExtending Right Hand Technique to Include the Little Finger\u201d was published in Soundboard<\/em> in its Spring, Summer, and Fall issues in 2002, with a follow-up interview in two issues later in 2003. Classical Guitar<\/em> published them in the March, April, and May issues 2004.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I leave the summing up to Ricardo Iznaola: \u201cNow we consider the four-finger approach necessary, but is it sufficient? Are we now at a similar moment in guitar technical development as at the end of the 18th century, when the p-i-m technique became enriched by increasingly frequent incursions of the pesky \u201ca\u201d finger, until it became part of the technical norm? One thing I would bet on: whatever is possible becomes a reality sooner or later.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kazuhito Yamashita has used the right-hand little finger in some of his arrangements\/transcriptions. It looks like it may be used sparingly here:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n