Meditation music


Meditation music is music performed to aid in the practice of meditation. It can have a specific religious content, but also more recently has been associated with modern composers who use meditation techniques in their process of composition, or who compose such music with no particular religious group as a focus. The concept also includes music performed as an act of meditation.

History

Modern meditation music in the 20th century began when composers such as John Cage, Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Lawrence Ball began to combine meditation techniques and concepts, and music. Specific works include Tony Scott's Music for Zen Meditation, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Inori, Mantra, Hymnen, Stimmung, and Aus den sieben Tagen, Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, and Ben Johnston, whose Visions and Spells, requires a meditation period prior to performance. R. Murray Schafer's concepts of clairaudience as well as the ones found in his The Tuning of the World are meditative.
Stockhausen describes Aus den sieben Tagen as "intuitive music" and in the piece "Es" from this cycle the performers are instructed to play only when not thinking or in a state of nonthinking. John Cage was influenced by Zen and pieces such as Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for twelve radios are "meditations that measure the passing of time".

Christian meditation music

Some Christian faiths, particularly the Catholic Church, reject meditation practice from outside their traditions, particularly new-age music. However, the Olivier Messiaen piece referenced above is explicitly Christian, and Messiaen himself was a practicing Catholic and a church organist.