• The physical benefits: Creates a toned, flexible, and strong body. Improves respiration, energy, and vitality. Helps to maintain a balanced metabolism. Promotes cardio and circulatory health. Relieves pain. Helps you look and feel younger than your age. Improves your athletic performance.
  
  
• The mental benefits: Helps you relax and handle stressful situations more easily. Teaches you how to quiet the mind so you can focus your energy where you want it to go - into a difficult yoga pose, on the tennis court or golf course, or in the office. Encourages positive thoughts and self-acceptance.
  
  
• The spiritual benefits: Builds awareness of your body, your feelings, the world around you, the needs of others. Promotes an interdependence between mind, body, and spirit. Helps you live the concept of "oneness."
  
  

Prodigy now offers Vinyasa Flow Yoga!
Fridays from 10-11am, ages 18+, $15 per class--drop in rate, bring your own mat.

Contributed by Kaitlin Pianowski, Head of Operations

The other day, one of my Facebook friends from high school posted a picture of his brand new guitar and added the statement that his goal was to learn just seven chords. He felt that seven chords were enough to make beautiful music and that was why he bought the guitar in the first place. My comment to him was, “Why seven, four were good enough for Elvis!”

I know this fact because of some research I did in preparation for a play about King Henry VIII that I was involved in. The music for the play started out classical and gradually changed to modern and even rock music. I spent an afternoon with the director’s favorite Elvis CD learning songs that might be used in the play. After about 4 or 5, I began to see the pattern. Almost every song could be played using D, G, A and B minor. I ended up learning several more songs that day and they all used these four chords (he ended up using the song “Burning Love” for the play with Henry himself singing lead). It was a revelation! All my life I’d been striving to learn more complex and difficult music, but what people really loved is 3 and 4 chord rock and roll. The very kind of rock made people incredibly happy with this simplified music. He wrote enough hit songs to keep any listener content for a good long while.

Now I didn’t mean to discourage my friend from achieving his goal of seven chords, I just wanted him to know that the beautiful music he wished to make was within his grasp long before all seven chords are under his fingers. There are hundreds of songs from all different styles of music that can be played with as little as two chords (“Mary Had A Little Lamb” comes to mind).

My advice is this; as soon as you learn C and G or D and A, look up every two chord songs you can find and start playing. If you can sing along, do so. This makes the song immediately recognizable and may lead to spontaneous sing-alongs. And by the time you’ve learned four chords you’ll be ready to play along with the King.

Happy practicing!

-Contributed by (in the words of) Joel Davis, guitar instructor

Many of us have heard the idea that everyone is connected to one another within only six steps or fewer, but how do we know for sure that it is true? Thinkers have been putting this “small world” theory to the test for the past several decades, and much can be read on their findings and statistics. However, the real question for us as musicians is whether we have the privilege to say that we have connections to some of the greatest composers in all the history of Western Music. Classical music titans like Mozart, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff—they all come from various historical time periods, but are all still generally from too long ago to even allow us to entertain the thought that we could perhaps be indirect pupils to these masters. Well, today those questions will be put to rest. At Prodigy’s music department, the spirits and sounds crafted by these beloved composers have long lingered through the halls and classrooms. One of Prodigy’s piano instructors, Patricia Wang, is glad to tell all students that they are truly six degrees of separation from virtuosic Romantic-era composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886)! Many will be shocked and pleased to find that there are even more fantastic connections aside from Liszt—this is how it breaks down:

·       Students/Colleagues of Patricia Wang

·       Laurie Meinhold (Patricia’s teacher of twelve years before going to UCSD)

·       Marjorie Short (Laurie’s teacher)

·       Madame Concanon (Marjorie’s teacher)

·       Teresa Carreno (Madame’s teacher)

·       Franz Liszt (Teresa performed for him in Paris), 1811-1886

·       Carl Czerny (Liszt was his most famous student), 1791-1857

·       Ludwig van Beethoven (Czerny’s famous teacher), 1770-1827

·       Franz Joseph Haydn (Beethoven’s famous teacher), 1732-1809

So there you have it, six steps away from Franz Liszt, and technically also from Czerny, Beethoven, and Haydn, some of classical music’s greatest and most recognized composers and musicians. The world is truly small after all—at least in the musical realm!

Some related music for your enjoyment:
·       Franz Liszt – Liebesträume No. 3 (Solo piano, composed in 1850)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpOtuoHL45Y

·       Franz Liszt – Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (A HILARIOUS and memorable one-piano-turned-four-hands take performed by Victor Borge and Sahan Arzruni in 1968, composed by Liszt in 1851)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aajtw30-YG0

Foster your child’s inner Liszt by signing up first-time pianists (ages 5-8) for Group Piano, or for private piano lessons (all ages welcome) with one of our instructors!

--Contributed by Patricia Wang, piano instructor