Music for meditation?
There
is an enormous interest in the relatively new genre of music concerned with meditation and
relaxation, and it forms a lucrative market for producers of new-age music. As this subject brings
together two of my interests, music and meditation, I thought it worthwhile to
comment on this popular trend and explore the thinking behind its use.
The
origins of the word meditation are from the mid-16th century
Meditation n.
quiet thought, reflection
Mid 16th
century: from
Latin meditat- 'contemplated',
from the verb meditari, from a base meaning 'measure'; related to mete. Greek medesthai to
be mindful, take thought, plan. The
Welsh meddwl, both senses of mind, to care for and to think.
(sources Chambers Dictionary of Etymology)
As a distinction is made between meditation and
contemplation:
Contemplation….the act or fact of looking at or
considering. (CDoE)
Both of these definitions are in keeping with
Western religious attitudes, and it should be the case that it satisfies a
large number of Christian worshipers who would turn to plainsong, masses or
hymns as their source of music for contemplation. It is clear though that the new kid on the
block is not of this nature.
From the perspective of 20th century
music John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen both have a part to play in the
fusion of meditation and music, the notion of non-thought occurs regularly in
their writing and music. “Stimmung” (KS)
is a model for much of the popular music that follows, there are many levels of
design to this work, one part is the use of texts relating to the names given
to gods/goddesses, but there are erotic verses as well. The title which literally means tuning
reminds one of the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out popularised by Timothy
Leary in 1966 two years before Stimmung (1968 Madison, Connecticut). The 60’s
was the period for the popular exploration
of Eastern philosophy, the echoes of which are still with us today. Stockhausen’s
title also refers to the term die stimme – voice, and this needs further
examination in the context of this blog.
The voice has a significant role in meditation
and takes many forms, chant turns up in most religious traditions; comparing
the recitation of The Lord’s Prayer with shamanic throat singing may seem a
world apart but their intentions are not. When I discussed meditation and the
voice with Herbert Whone (1) he constantly
turned the conversation to “the inner voice, the one that is never still”, and
he used the phrase monkey-jumping to describe the way in which it (the
inner-voice) had the remarkable ability to move from one consideration to
another with considerable ease. This is
really the heart of the problem that faces a majority of our population and
causes us to search out a solution, usually a solution at the cheapest price
and least effort. We are distracted beings, for musicians whose concerns are
tied into the moment by moment exposition of material this isn’t good news.
In the musical world there is a popular element
to many of the recordings made for meditation, the production is slick, the
sounds modified to be acceptable, the use of soft synthetic voices, and
recordings of natural sounds for urban dwellers. All of this is wholly acceptable for people
who want to follow an easy route to a difficult problem. Like learning a
language we all know the usual tricks of “Learn to speak…in 10 days”. I have nothing against such marketing, there
is no untruth in the comment, it is of course, partially true.
A recent popular meditative movement is
mindfulness, it has many qualities, it is not based on religious teaching, it
has simple procedures to follow, it may be taught to any age group. It does not
have a problem with using music as an accompaniment to use. The term often used
is insight meditation.
As we restrict the blogs to 1k words here is a straightforward
and short account which draws together some of the positive attributes of mindfulness
for the performer and listener:
There
is no particular type of music for mindfulness exercises; it can be the metal
clang of cymbals or the clang of heavy metal. On a personal level I can recall
as a teenager listening with great care to “The Rite of Spring” and noticing
after the music had finished that the notion of listening to a recording (on a
rather cheap mono player) had vanished.
There was an acute response to the material in terms of feeling the
phrasing, the melodic units etc. I had, by paying attention to the music, slipped
into a more refined listening. This was
not the last time I experienced “improved” listening, the most recent was with
our study of Bax, and the music was the third movement of the third
symphony. I have listened to this many
times in the last couple of months but only once experienced such a deep
contact.
Do
musicians who listen regularly and pay attention to music naturally enter a
form of meditation?
My
belief is that they do, but this is not to say that using meditative techniques
in addition to listening doesn’t refine the process. At university I was taught the Alexander technique
to assist performance skills, and it was quite a gently amusing sight to see
those involved in its use at afternoon recitals sitting in such a different way
to the slouching composers and researchers (myself included). The point is that this technique also had the
attention drawn onto a particular focus, rather like the difference between
hatha and raja yoga. As such it was a valued tool in improving the skills of the
students. (In passing I will pass on the information that Adrian Boult was
strongly influenced by the technique).
I
was asked by a friend to write a work which would assist with his use of
mindfulness, so I spent some time listening to other approaches. In the end I turned to my own experience. Many decades ago while passing a rehearsal of
a Cage piano piece for prepared piano I couldn’t help but stop and listen for a
period of several minutes. Later that
night, just before sleeping, the sounds came back to me, as if there was a
performance taking place in the room, it stopped as suddenly as it started.
This is one source of my interest in bells and bell like sounds. The music link below takes us to an
exploration of bell sounds with phrase lengths based on breathing. It never achieved popular status, but it
seemed to satisfy one customer and I still listen to it myself to stop the
monkey leaping from tree to tree.
1.
Herbert Whone: The Simplicity of
Playing the Violin (1972), with a foreword by his friend Colin Davis and
illustrated with his own drawings. Two further volumes, The Hidden Face of
Music (1974) and The Integrated Violinist (1976)
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