Concert
and academic career
Yatri brings to this album an impressive background as a classical concert pianist. She recorded and toured internationally for ten years with the Canadian chamber music ensemble CAMERATA as Kathryn Root. She received her Masters Degree in Piano Performance from Indiana University and has taught in three universities.
Glass music
When first introduced to the unique sound of "glass music" by Eric Cadesky of Toronto's Glass Orchestra, she fell in love with the sound. Since having her reconstruction of a Benjamin Franklin Armonica created for her by Gerhard Finkenbeiner in 1989, her crystal music has been heard on radio, television, and on film soundtrack. She performs live within dance and theater performances as well as improvising in holistic health and meditation settings.
Interest in healing and hospice
Yatri's basic nature is quiet and contemplative. In spite of having spent much of her life in the limelight of the concert stage, she is very drawn to healing and meditation. Alongside her musical background, she has also studied various aspects of alternative healing. Her greatest spiritual rewards have come from playing piano for the dying in a hospice setting.
In 1991 Yatri joined the staff of the largest yoga center in North America, the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts. She still frequently improvises meditation and relaxation music for the guest programs at the Kripalu Center. She left her full-time position there in late 1998 to further study the healing aspects of the crystal bowls and to focus on recording projects.
The recording of 'crystal spirit'
With Grammy award-winning engineer Chris
Brown at the recording console,
Yatri improvised for seven hours in a small studio beneath the Chapel
of
the Kripalu Center. "My mood during the recording session was
contemplative
and prayerful, and my intention was to freely go with the music,
allowing
it to take me where it would, and to basically keep my left-brain out
of
the picture as much as possible. What I wanted this album to be was a
medium
for creating stillness."
The bell-like sound and glissandi heard in the album were created by playing the Armonica bowls with some tiny rubber-tipped mallets. Yatri added some synthesized string and nature sounds created on a Roland JV880 during the editing process.
