Meditation music includes music played with or listened to during meditation, 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.
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Meditation music in the west began when some composers began to combine meditation and music, for example, John Cage, Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Lawrence Ball.
Some examples are Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra (1970), Hymnen (1969), 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).
New Age music meets with disapproval among some Christians.[1][2][3][4] The expression Christian meditation music is sometimes used to describe similar music produced by members of the Christian faith community. In the same way as New Age music has never been a well-defined genre, so too a broad range of contemplative styles of music have come to be associated with Christian meditation.
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