Meditation music includes music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

 played with or listened to during meditation

Meditation

Meditation is any form of a family of practices in which practitioners train their minds or self-induce a mode of consciousness to realize some benefit....

, music the performance of which is a meditation, or music which is meditative. Music may distract from or enhance meditation, and meditation may involve music making.

Examples

Some composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

s have combined meditation and music, for example, John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

, Stuart Dempster

Stuart Dempster

Stuart Dempster is a trombonist, didjeridu player, improvisor, and composer.-Biography:After Dempster completed his studies at San Francisco State College, he was appointed assistant professor at the California State College at Hayward, and instructor at the San Francisco Conservatory...

, Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros is an American accordionist and composer who is a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music....

, Terry Riley

Terry Riley

Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...

, La Monte Young

La Monte Young

La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...

 and Lawrence Ball

Lawrence Ball

Lawrence Ball is an English musician and composer who currently lives in North London. He produces multi-media compositions, performs in concert, and also works as a private tutor in mathematics, music theory and physics....

; others have written meditative pieces. Some examples are Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

's Mantra

Mantra (Stockhausen)

Mantra is a composition by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was composed in 1970 and premiered in autumn of the same year in Donaueschingen...

(1970), Hymnen

Hymnen

Hymnen is an electronic and concrete work, with optional live performers, by Karlheinz Stockhausen, composed in 1966–67, and elaborated in 1969. In the composer's catalog of works, it is "Nr. 22".-Musical form and content:...

(1969), Stimmung

Stimmung

Stimmung, for six vocalists and six microphones, is a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen, written in 1968 and commissioned by the City of Cologne for the Collegium Vocale Köln. Its average length is seventy-four minutes, and it bears the work number 24 in the composer's catalog...

(1968), and Aus den sieben Tagen

Aus den Sieben Tagen

Aus den sieben Tagen is a collection of 15 text compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen, composed in May 1968, in reaction to a personal crisis, and characterized as "Intuitive music"—music produced primarily from the intuition rather than the intellect of the performer...

 (1968), Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex ; harmonically and melodically it is based on modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from his early compositions and improvisations...

's Quartet for the End of Time (1941), and Ben Johnston

Ben Johnston

Benjamin Burwell Johnston, Jr. is a composer of contemporary music in the just intonation system.-Johnston's music:...

, whose Visions and Spells (a realization of Vigil (1976)), requires a meditation period prior to performance. R. Murray Schafer

R. Murray Schafer

Raymond Murray Schafer is a Canadian composer, writer, music educator and environmentalist perhaps best known for his World Soundscape Project, concern for acoustic ecology, and his book The Tuning of the World...

's concepts of clairaudience (clean hearing) as well as the ones found in his The Tuning of the World (1977) are meditative (Von Gunden 1983, 103–104).

Stockhausen describes Aus den sieben Tagen as "intuitive music

Intuitive music

Intuitive music is a form of musical improvisation based on instant creation in which fixed principles or rules may or may not have been given. It is a type of process music where instead of a traditional music score, verbal or graphic instructions and ideas are provided to the performers...

" and in the piece "Es" from this cycle the performers are instructed to play only when not thinking or in a state of nonthinking (Von Gunden asserts that this is contradictory and should be "think about your playing"). John Cage was influenced by Zen and pieces such as Imaginary Landscape

Imaginary Landscape

Imaginary Landscape is the title of several pieces by American composer John Cage. The series comprises the following works:* Imaginary Landscape No. 1 **for two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal...

No. 4 for twelve radios are "meditations that measure the passing of time" (Von Gunden 1983, 104).

Sources

• Von Gunden, Heidi (1983). The Music of Pauline Oliveros. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-1600-8.