Music For Life: Yoga+ Music

Music for Life workshops explore the fundamental questions of making music in a practical and palatable way:

1) Is there a reason playing music might make you feel good?
2) How do we get the best possible tone quality?
3) How do we play together as an ensemble?
4) Why play music at all?

Funding is available from the Lowell Mason House
http://www.lowellmasonhouse.org/

The Lowell Mason House in Medfield, MA serves as a space for active music making and music education, arts advocacy and preserves the legacy of our nation's first music educator, Lowell Mason.

About the program:

Take a look at the workshop

Wider Scope

Students explore the questions of music making through an experiment of their own. Students first quantify their mood through a perceived stress test. They then briefly learn about the role of their nervous system in regulating stress response. Students then perform yoga breathing exercises to understand better their breath in music and the breaths role in stress response. Bridging to the music, the students make a pre-yoga musical recording. Clinicians lead students through yoga breathing exercises integrated into the music and make a post recording and compare the jaw-dropping improvements. The workshop ends by revisiting and quantifying their mood with the perceived stress scale, leaving students with hard evidence as to the improvement in both their improved state of stress and improved musical output.

Listen to the Results

See the results

See Some Examples

Mission Statement

Music for Life; A life of Music is a program designed to give students with disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds some skills and tools necessary to modulate the effects of stressful life circumstances through yoga and through music making. The program seeks to apply a praxial philosophy of music making by engaging students to develop in their musical skills, but also to develop an awareness of how their musical skills are related to their psycho-physical behavior response and how to modulate their response through breath and musical control.

Music for Life: A Life of Music