Breathe deep, play well: Can yoga aid music study?

LENOX -- Twelve of the most talented young musicians in the world are sitting in a room together, and they are blowing their noses.

Loudly. Repeatedly. In unison.

Facing the 12 nose-blowers is a woman clothed entirely in spandex. She sits cross-legged on a purple mat, revealing a tattoo on the inside of her right ankle.

``Imagine you're blowing out a candle with your nose," she says, watching the musicians' quick, violent exhalations. They sound like some sort of industrial vacuum pump. ``Let the breaths be strong and thick, cleaning out all that carbon dioxide, replacing it with prana , with oxygen, with life-force energy pulsing through your body."

Yoga instructor Larissa Hall Carlson pauses for a moment.

``We've got tissues handy if you need them."

The musicians are fellows at the Tanglewood Music Center, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and perhaps the country's most prestigious summer program for professional and pre-professional musicians. They range in age from 19 to 36 and come from such places as Yale University and the New England Conservatory of Music. But for two hours each week, these musicians set aside Puccini and Prokofiev for Patanjali -- the author of the 2,000-year-old ``Yoga Sutras," the bible of yoga.

The class, located on the verdant grounds of the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, is part of a unique collaboration, now in its second summer, between Tanglewood, Kripalu, and Harvard Medical School, which is studying the effects of yoga on the musicians' performance. Thirty of this summer's 151 Tanglewood fellows participated in the program at Kripalu -- the country's largest yoga center and Tanglewood's across-the-street neighbor -- and 20 more fellows volunteered to be controls for the Harvard study, which is being run by Sat Bir S. Khalsa , one of the world's foremost medical authorities on yoga.

When Kripalu proposed a joint program in 2004, Ellen Highstein , director of the Tanglewood Music Center, jumped at the idea. Since she arrived in 1997, one of Highstein's top concerns, she says, has been the strain caused by her students' heavy workload. Before she came, many of the fellows were performing for eight or nine hours each day, Highstein says. Some were leaving the Berkshires with exhaustion, if not tendinitis.

``Frankly, it was hampering our recruiting to some degree," Highstein says. ``We didn't want to be a school that teachers were reluctant to send their students to."

Khalsa, an assistant professor at Harvard and a researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital , was interested in yoga's ability to mitigate the physical and psychological burdens of a musical career.

``Professional musicians are exposed to a substantial deal of stress," Khalsa says. ``The two major consequences of that stress are, number one, performance-related muscular-skeletal disorders, and, number two, performance anxiety. Surveys have shown that well over half of all musicians suffer from performance anxiety at some point."

When he began conducting research on last summer's Kripalu-Tanglewood pilot program, Khalsa's hypothesis was that practicing yoga regularly would reduce stress and help the musicians avoid injury. The preliminary results of the study, published in the current issue of the online Medical Science Monitor (www.medscimonit.com), show that musicians in the eight-week program demonstrated improvements in most categories, relative to a control group, but statistically significant improvements only in performance anxiety. ``The very positive response on the yoga program evaluation questionnaire and comments made by the yoga participants add to the conclusion that the yoga lifestyle program was well received by, and of benefit to, the participants," Khalsa wrote.

That came as no surprise to violinist Margot Schwartz , a graduate student at the Yale School of Music who participated in last summer's Tanglewood-Kripalu program and returned this year for a second helping.

``I came back to see if I could pick up where I left off last year," says Schwartz, a native of Berkeley, Calif., before the yoga class. ``The 10 of us in last year's program became really close and discovered that we had many of the same issues. The fellowship can be physically taxing; some days we have six hours of rehearsal."

Of the 30 students selected for this summer's yoga program, which was jointly designed by Khalsa and Stephen Cope , the director of Kripalu's Institute for Extraordinary Living (``I made the title up myself," Cope says), half participated in basic yoga classes and half, in addition, followed an intensive regimen including daily meditation, macrobiotic meals at Kripalu, and a once-a-week yoga master class with Cope. The programs were intended to measure the benefits of yoga alone against the benefits of a ``yoga lifestyle."

In his master classes, Cope, a trim, goateed 57-year-old who looks at least 10 years younger, instructs the musicians in yoga philosophy.

``Most people think of yoga as a physical activity, but actually it's about attention training," he says.

Cope, a trained pianist , became interested in the connections between music and yoga when he came to Kripalu in 1989 to do research for a book he was writing. He became a regular attendee at Tanglewood, frequently crossing the street to see Seiji Ozawa conduct the BSO.

``I would see Ozawa in profoundly deep stages of concentration," Cope says. ``You could tell by his face, by his gestures, by his memory."

Cope compares the extraordinary memory required of musicians to that of Buddhist monks, who learn to visualize complex tapestries with their eyes closed. The intense concentration this entails exerts a ``field effect" on observers, he says.

``One way you can tell if a performer is concentrated is that the audience gets concentrated. They get very quiet," he says. ``You noticed that over the course of Garrick Ohlsson's series of [recent Tanglewood piano] concerts, where he played all of Beethoven's 32 sonatas by memory, the audience became larger, and also quieter. During Ohlsson's final performance you could hear every breath in Ozawa Hall."

When everything is going right in a performance, musicians often feel like they become one with their music. These ``flow states" are typically viewed in the West as ``lucky happenstance, a good night," says Cope. ``But the Eastern contemplative tradition actually has techniques to systematically train the mind and the body to enter a flow state."

One of the most popular techniques is rhythmic breathing.

``When you're meditating and your mind wanders off, the way to come back is to focus on your breath," Schwartz says. ``It's not rocket science."

Jamie Van Eyck , a mezzo-soprano who sings with the Utah Opera and a graduate of the New England Conservatory, used this technique to maintain concentration during last month's Tanglewood performances of Elliot Carter's contemporary opera ``What Next?"

``It was a 40- or 50-minute opera, and there was no time when you could relax," says Van Eyck, whose Nordic looks suggest one of Wagner's Valkyries. ``You had to count every measure. It's not like Puccini, where you hear the music and you just know when to come in."

Back at the yoga class, Carlson, manager of yoga education at Kripalu, leads her students through a series of relaxation techniques. She tells the musicians to rub their palms together to warm them up, then place their left hand over their heart and their right hand on a part of their body that's in pain. Both Schwartz and Van Eyck place their right hand on the back of their neck .

``Now breathe deeply," Carlson continues in her soothing voice. ``Feel the breath circulating that warm, pure energy, moving out from the heart center to that area that needs attention."

No one speaks for about half a minute.

``Now set an intention for this week," she says. ``Let that intention well up in the heart center, and in hope of controlling that which happens within us, let's chant the uniting sound of `om.' "

``Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm ."

Michael Hardy can be reached at mhardy@globe.com.