THE PARALLEL BETWEEN MUSIC AND KATONAH YOGA
with Kyle Henry

March 9th 2020

Something I love about yoga is that it really underpins what I'm doing as a musician.

If we're looking at it from a very formal standpoint, if you're learning how to play the piano or if you're learning how to sing, first you have to learn scales. First you have to learn how to position your hands on the keyboard. First you have to learn how to use your breath when you're singing. And then once you go from there, you're going to start learning really simple songs. You're going to learn really simple pieces on the piano. You'll do your finger exercises and everything.

And it's similar in yoga where once you're in a form, you have to really learn how to articulate a pose. You have to learn what a downward facing dog pose really is before you start to see how it's going to apply to a larger piece of music. Nevine likes to say that you have to learn how to conjugate a verb before you take your French out into a bar.

But I think how music is really cool in terms of applying it to Katonah yoga is you have to learn how to play scales and you have to learn how to play arpeggios before you're going to get to playing Mozart. If I'm working with like a music student and we start to do Mozart and they're scooping and they're sliding and they're making it sound like a pop song, i'll be like, well, girlfriend, that is a pop song that is not Mozart.

So again, any classical musician will say: this is your version of Mozart. And it isn’t Mozart. We're expecting a certain thing to be performed when you go to a concert to hear Mozart. I think what really shows us that in this practice is we're looking at any form, we're looking at any Asana and how you're putting it together.

How do you articulate the pose and how are you referencing the ideal of the pose, which in music would be the score. The composer has given you certain things that you want to look at and that you want to honor, and then you can start to really live within that. Once you learn how to play the music, once you learn how to play the right notes at all the right times, then you might be able to start to break the rules depending on the style of the music.

And I think it's similar in a yoga practice where once you learn the forms, once you learn how to do a dog, once you learn how to do a hang, then you can start to figure out how to put them together.