Myrtle Guerrero

Guerrero, Myrtle

Myrtle Guerrero (b Rose, later m Knox-Leet). Educator, b North Battleford, Sask, 5 Aug 1906, d Oakville, Ont, 11 Aug 1995; ATCM 1939. After private studies 1917-28 in Lethbridge, Alta, she continued her training 1928-32 at the TCM, where her piano teachers were Peter C. Kennedy and Alberto Guerrero. She also studied harpsichord with Wanda Landowska and piano with Alfred Cortot 1936-7 in France and piano 1961-2 with Guido Agosti in Siena. An examiner 1940-68 for the TCM, (RCMT), she began teaching piano at the University of Toronto in 1950 and at McMaster University in 1977. Her pupils have included Tony Collacott (who, as a teenager in the early 1960s, had a sensational career in Toronto jazz clubs), Erica Goodman, Angela Hewitt, and Kathleen Solose. Guerrero gave many teachers' workshops and lectures in Canada, the USA, and England, and in 1969 she established the Piano Teachers' Workshop, a two-week residential course for private teachers held each summer at Geneva Park, near Orillia, Ont, until 1987. In 1988 Guerrero began an annual non-resident one-week program at the Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts. She encouraged students to develop their individual musical personality and to approach music as a means of self-expression. After 1990, she continued to teach privately. With her first husband, Alberto Guerrero, she wrote The New Approach to Piano (2 vols, Oakville, Ont, ca 1935). After the death of her husband in 1959, she was married a second time, to Richard Knox-Leet.

Writings

- and Guerrero, Albert. The New Approach to Piano. Oakville, 1935.