Igor Gorin News
American opera singer (1904-1982)
Commemorations 2024 (Birth: Igor Gorin)
- baritone
- United States of America
- opera singer, music teacher
Last update
2024-04-25
Refresh
2017-07-22 22:21:42
Watching a colleague teaching a child in Madrid (on video) brought home the complexity of playing just two notes with beauty. What might be construed as an innately “natural” approach to piano playing, must in reality be learned by beginning students with meticulous attention to vocal modeling, touch sensitivity, and an infusion of imagination. Irina Gorin is a remarkable example of mentoring at its highest level as she guides a young student to attain all the ingredients of a singing tone legato, by pairing two “sighing” notes with an activation of relaxed arms and supple wrist forward movements. But the right “mechanics” of motion are not enough. The student must absorb the “feeling” of weight transfer and fluidity of motion, as she ties it to the imagined/internalized tonal ideal. And tone is tied to the way we phrase notes that have a pervasive musical relationship to each other. (Words and music […]
2016-04-12 23:07:09
[…] on multiple forums increasing exponential divisions. It could lead to pedagogical rifts with global consequence without hope for a discernible climate change. Refreshing my fuzzy memory of a previously bickering cosmos, I had posted that the whole arm funnels energy to supple wrists and relaxed hands. It was in response to a posted video that celebrated the “forearm” as the principle route to a crisp and resilient staccato. Others on on the forum embraced Irina Gorin’s leap frog spring forward staccato motions generated by the whole arm into supple wrists. (Gorin created Tales of a Musical Journey, an early instructional method for children that opposes early five-finger position ideologies, and supports a singing tone with embedded physical/musical demonstrations.) Her holistic approach to technique was channeled in a filmed staccato excerpt where she enlisted a tiny plastic frog perched on the pupil’s wrist. As I watched the child’s improved efforts […]
2016-04-05 22:33:55
[…] transfer of visual note movement on the staff to relaxed arms, wrists, hands, and fingers, draped naturally over the keys, reinforces note reading, synthesized with musical expression. The eventual mastery of a piece leading to memorization should ideally have an analytical foundation where beginning students find patterns, sequences, repetitions, within a composition that support its retention as it ripens over time. Recommended examples of early pedagogy: Irina Morozova teaching a 6 year old Irina Gorin teaching a transfer student Liz has first piano lesson, Part 2
2014-11-14 20:12:48
[…] have been measured scientifically. There is no difference whatsoever in tone production whether you lower a key with your finger or a pencil, and whether your wrist is supple or not. We recognize sound or tone changes when two or more tones are played.” In one of his teaching videos (“You and the Piano,” Part 4), Bernstein demonstrates an “upper arm roll” with an “undulating wrist” that together produce an enviable singing tone. Irina Gorin, piano teacher and Tales of a Musical Journey creator uses “weeping willow” arms as her imaginative springboard for imbuing awareness of the singing tone in her youngest students. Here she partners relaxed breathing with flowing supple wrists: Here’s her dead weight arm/wrist drop approach using a hairband with a pupil: In my demonstration, I extract a few measures from J.S. Bach’s Sarabande, French Suite in G, BWV 816 to model supple wrist […]
or
- timeline: Lyrical singers (North America). Performers (North America).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): G...