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 (1964), Karlheinz Stockhausen's Inori (1974), Mantra (1970), Hymnen (1966–67), Stimmung (1968), and Aus den sieben Tagen (1968), Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (1941), and Ben Johnston, whose Visions and Spells (a realization of Vigil (1976)), requires a meditation period prior to performance. R. Murray Schafer'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" 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 No. 4 for twelve radios are "meditations that measure the passing of time" (Von Gunden 1983, 104).

Christian meditation music

Some Christian faiths, particularly the Catholic Church, reject meditation practice from outside their traditions, particularly new-age music (Anon. 2003; Arie 2003; Krumboltz and Chan 2005, 358; Pontifical Council for Culture, and Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue 2003). However, the Olivier Messiaen piece referenced above is explicitly Christian, and Messiaen himself was a practicing Catholic and a church organist.

This Sound Healing Meditation Music of 432Hz 'Womb Consciousness' by Padma Aon Prakasha plays the actual vibrational frequencies of hydrogen and oxygen, the water molecule of life, with the vibrational frequencies of deep violet, light violet and the Sun with 432Hz, the natural tone of geometric harmony and organic wellbeing. 40 different tones are spherically mixed on this Song to provide a vibrational frequency healing.

Video Meditation Music : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnkIJdBeXy1R1Ygk7j8Kgdg

This song invites you to drop into your centre of gravity in the womb/hara, the primordial source presence within your body. If you relax and breathe here, you will feel layers softening and opening, revealing more of this depth presence within you through this healing meditation music and healing frequencies.

This song touches the deep subconscious awareness of the water element. It can stir dormant memories held in the womb space, stirring them to be felt and released, allowing more openness and fluidity within you.

This Song is from The Souls Birth Album ( see other video) and is available on www.padmaaon.com. This DNA video is made with Lynn Claire Dennis of www.mereon.org, with her 'Universal Sound Frequency embedded within it.

See also

• Aesthetics of music
• Avant-garde music
• Introspection

References

• Anon. (2003). "Vatican Book Is Offering Reflections On 'New Age'". New York Times (4 February).
• Arie, Sophie (2003). "Beware New Age, Vatican Tells Flock". The Guardian (Thursday 30 January).
• Krumboltz, John D., and Anne Chan (2005). "Professional Issues in Vocational Psychology". In Handbook of Vocational Psychology: Theory, Research, and Practice, third edition, edited by W. Bruce Walsh and Mark L. Savickas, 345–68. Contemporary Topics in Vocational Psychology. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 978-0-8058-4517-4.
• Pontifical Council for Culture, and Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (2003). "Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water Of Life: A Christian Reflection on the 'New Age'". Vatican website (accessed 2 January 2014).
• Von Gunden, Heidi (1983). The Music of Pauline Oliveros. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-1600-8.

Further reading

• Johnson, Tom (1976). "Meditate on Sound", Village Voice (May 24).