Book Club
The Yoga for All Musicians community has always connected through literature. Before YAM was even established, Amelia, Brianne, and Claire often shared their favorite books with each other. They spent hours talking about their application to life as musicians and yoga practitioners.
This, paired with our dedication to building a community of lifelong learners, has sprouted the idea of our book club!
You don't actually have to sign up anywhere to "join," but we invite you to read with us. We aim to choose books that directly relate to being musicians, but they won't be the books you see in school! We spend time during each community night discussing our book of the month.
This Month
[ YAM book club will be returning soon!]
Previous Reads
The Savvy Musician
Building a career, earning a living, & making a difference
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by David Cutler
So you’re talented, well trained, and passionate about music. What next? The professional marketplace is flooded with outstanding musicians, forced to compete for a shrinking number of ""traditional"" opportunities. The Savvy Musician helps balance three overriding aspects of your professional musical life: (1) building a career, (2) earning a living, and (3) making a difference. Filled with clearly articulated concepts, detailed strategies, and 165 vignettes about actual musicians working to create a meaningful and prosperous career, this book examines critical elements often overlooked or misunderstood by musicians, and helps you take control of your career. Discover how to build an immediately recognizable ""brand,"" capitalize on technology―from Internet tools to the new recording paradigm, expand your network, and raise money to fund your dreams. The Savvy Musician is an invaluable resource for performers, composers, educators, students, administrators, industry employees, and others interested in a thriving musical future.
RSVP for Community Night
June 25, 7p CST
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The Body Keeps the Score
Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
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by Bessel Van Der Kolk
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity.
RSVP for Community Night
March 26, 7p CST
The Places that Scare You
A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
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by Pema Chodron
We always have a choice in how we react to the circumstances of our lives. We can let them harden us and make us increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and allow our inherent human kindness to shine through. Here Pema Chödrön provides essential tools for dealing with the many difficulties that life throws our way, teaching us how to awaken our basic human goodness and connect deeply with others—to accept ourselves and everything around us complete with faults and imperfections. She shows the strength that comes from staying in touch with what’s happening in our lives right now and helps us unmask the ways in which our egos cause us to resist life as it is. If we go to the places that scare us, Pema suggests, we just might find the boundless life we’ve always dreamed of.
RSVP for Community Night
February 26, 7p CST
A Soprano on Her Head
Right-side up reflections on life and other performances​
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by Eloise Ristad
Those interested in creative education have long felt that an entirely new, holistic and nurturing process of allowing individuals to discover and express themselves is needed if our educational system is to avoid the neuroses and creative blocks of the past generation. This book illuminates through its conversational style the destructive inhibitions, fears, and guilt experienced by all of us as we fail to break through to creativity.
But what is important, A Soprano on Her Head supplies answers and methods for overcoming these universal psychological blocks--methods that have not only been proven in her own studio, but which trace back through history to the oldest and wisest systems of understanding the integration of mind and body. The work bears scrutiny both scientifically and holistically.
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RSVP for Community Night
January 29, 7p CST
Grit
The Power of Passion and Perseverence​
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by Angela Duckworth
Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently noted her lack of “genius,” Duckworth, now a celebrated researcher and professor, describes her early eye-opening stints in teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not “genius” but a unique combination of passion and long-term perseverance.
RSVP for Community Night
December 18, 7p CST
The Inner Game of Tennis
The ultimate guide to the mental side of peak performance
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by W. Timothy Gallwey
This handbook works for anybody who wants to improve his or her performance in any activity, from playing music to getting ahead at work. W. Timothy Gallwey, a leading innovator in sports psychology, reveals how to
• focus your mind to overcome nervousness, self-doubt, and distractions
• find the state of “relaxed concentration” that allows you to play at your best
• build skills by smart practice
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RSVP for Community Night
September 25, 7p CST
The Talent Code
Greatness Isn't Born It's Grown
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by Daniel Coyle
What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? In this groundbreaking work, journalist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle provides parents, teachers, coaches, businesspeople—and everyone else—with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others.
RSVP for Community Night
October 30, 7p CST
Teaching Healthy Musicianship
The Music Educator's Guide to Injury Prevention and Wellness
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by Nancy Taylor
Written by a professional musician who is also a certified occupational therapist, Teaching Healthy Musicianship first and foremost help music educators avoid common injuries that they themselves encounter, and in the process it also equips them with the tools they need to instill healthy musicianship practices in their students. Author Nancy Taylor combines her two unique skill sets to provide a model for injury prevention that is equally cognizant of the needs of music educators and their students. Through practical explanation of body mechanics, ergonomics, and the performance-related health problems and risk factors unique to musicianship, she gives music educators the tools they need to first practice healthy posture, body mechanics, environmental safety, and ergonomics, and then to introduce these same practices to their students.
RSVP for Community Night
August 28th, 7p CST
It's Our Music Too
The Black Experience in Classical Music
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by Earl Ofari Hutchinson
"'The list of Africans, African-Americans and Afro-European composers, conductors, instrumental performers, and singers,” says Hutchinson, “is and always has been, rich, varied, and deep. Sadly, the recognition of this has almost always come in relation to the work of a major European or white American composer.” Hutchinson’s aim in It’s Our Music Too The Black Experience in Classical Music is not to update a book on blacks and classical music, or list the many notable individual breakthroughs of top flight black classical music performers and composers through the years.. Instead he tells the story of how blacks have actually influenced the development, history and structure of classical music in its major varied forms; opera, chamber pieces, symphonies, and concertos. It’s a story that’s filled with tragedy and triumph, heart break and heroism."
RSVP for Community Night
July 31, 7p CST
