Meditation music has gone mainstream
Prince Harry says he practises meditation every day and the normally abstemious Guardian recently published a healthy breaks supplement featuring a week's 'stillness and alignment retreat' on Ibiza costing £1,331 ($1715). As the usually buttoned-up Telegraph tells us, meditation has gone mainstream, which means YouTube now offers a copious selection of meditation music. A 2017 Overgrown Path post pointed out the yoga market in the US is worth $27 billion annually, which compares with a market for classical albums of less than $200 million. My post went on to suggest that grabbing just a small chunk of that $27 billion would solve a lot of classical music's funding problems.
Increasingly classical music is being sold as an entertainment medium, which inevitably takes it down the dumbing down route. So, although the purists will doubtless cringe, promoting classical music as a well-being tool is not such a bad idea. Because it both avoids the worst excesses of dumbing down and aligns the classical genre with the more legitimate but under-exploited discipline of music therapy. Linking classical music to enlightenment is, of course, not an original idea. Classic FM already lists the best music for mindfulness and yoga, and Spotify has a meditation music zone. But these lists are the usual predictable mixes of Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass interspersed with Satie and Debussy, plus the inevitable Max Richter.
So today I am proposing an alternative list of ten less-familiar works for incorporation into well-being practices. Additions (or dissensions!) are welcome. And before the naysayers let rip, please remember that a lot of people are using music as a well-being tool. If just one of them discovers the music of a composers on my list, that is job done.
John Luther Adams ~~ Become Ocean
Steve Roach ~~ Structures from Silence
Colin McPhee - Balinese Ceremonial Music played by Benjamin Britten and McPhee on two pianos
Arnold Bax ~~ Third Symphony: Epilogue, Poco Lento
Robert Rich ~~ Vestiges
Alan Hovhaness ~~ Symphony No. 2, Mysterious Mountain
Éliane Radigue ~~ L'Île Re-Sonante
Valentin Silvestrov ~~ Requiem for Larissa
Jonathan Harvey ~~ Curve with Plateaux for Cello Solo
Lou Harrison ~~ Piano Concerto: Third movement, Largo
Header photo via City Nomads. New Overgrown Path posts are available via RSS/email by entering your email address in the right-hand sidebar. Any copyrighted material is included for critical analysis, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).
Comments
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina ~~ Missa "Papae Marcelli"
Luzzasco Luzzaschi ~~ Madrigals
Girolamo Frescobaldi ~~ Fiori musicali
Jean Sibelius ~~ Symphony No. 2
Gerald Finzi ~~ Eclogue and Grand Fantasia and Toccata
Luciano Berio ~~ Points on a Curve to Find
Igor Stravinsky ~~ Orpheus
Benjamin Britten ~~ Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings
Witold Lutoslawski ~~ Livre, Musique funèbre
Peter Tchaikovsky - Serenade for strings
I almost did not run this post as I thought the subject of music for meditation might be just too off the wall. So it is good to find it generating some serious interest. Just goes to prove there is life beyond the dross that preoccupies so many other classical music blogs.
I created a good deal of similar electronic mood music years ago in grad school and appreciate the technical aspects of its creation, but I also appreciate the simplicity with which a few sounds/ideas can be drawn out from seconds to minutes to hours through layered editing—all of which seems antithetical to classical music, in my opinion.
This is not to criticize "Structures From Silence", but simply to express my surprise at finding it in a list intending in any way to link it to classical music. Tomatoes, tomahtoes, perhaps.
However my personal experience is that in Ānāpānasati meditation - mindfulness of breathing - staying with certain types of music can be an effective substitute for staying with the breath. However the music needs to be non-developmental; which is why Eliane Radigue, Robert Rich and Steve roach feature on my list. Some readers will not consider these composer's music is 'classical' and I will return to that observation in a new post.
When writing the piece I was also aware that many readers do not meditate in the true sense of the word. But many find music produces a wider and desirable change of consciousness - "a meditative state" as one reader terms it - and I suspect the considerable interest in this post is prompted in large part by those seeking a beneficial consciousness change without (yet?) adopting a formal meditation practice.
Finally, let me say how pleased I am to find a reader recommending Malcolm Arnold's music for meditation!