From Gregorian chant to John Tavener, Hildegard von Bingen to Howard Skempton, countless classical composers over the centuries have written music that offer us moments of stillness. We’ve put together a playlist of music to help calm, clear and focus the mind. This list of best classical music for meditation will calm your soul and nourish your mental health.
Best classical music for meditation
John Cage Dream
This misty piano piece by the great John Cage surrounds a dreamy melody in a soft cloud of resonance. This is created either by the sustaining pedal or holding on notes, as the performer wishes. It was written in 1948 for a work choreographed by Merce Cunningham.
• World’s first ‘mindfulness opera’ staged
Pauline Oliveros ‘Suiren’ from Deep Listening
The idea of ‘deep listening’ was, according to the American improviser and composer who came up with the term, ‘listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing’. Pauline Oliveros also liked a pun: her Deep Listening album was recorded in a disused cistern four metres underground.
Arvo Pärt Spiegel im Spiegel
Written for violin and piano, this ten-minute piece from 1978 has become one of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt‘s best-known works. It’s composed using his signature tintinnabuli style, with a melody unfolding over repeated triads. Slow and peaceful, it’s an ideal piece for meditation. Its title means ‘Mirror in the Mirror’ – if that isn’t a cue for reflection, we don’t know what is…
More best classical music for meditation and mental health
Hildegard von Bingen O Vis Aeternitatis
‘O power within eternity’ is one of the responsories written by the 12th-century German composer, poet and mystic, Hildegard von Bingen. More of her chant settings, such as this, survive than from any other Medieval composer.
Erik Satie ‘Les Anges’ from Trois mélodies
The first of an early set of three songs published in 1887, Les Anges sets a poem by one of Erik Satie‘s friends, known as JP Contamine de Latour. The poem, set in a free-floating style, mentions ‘angels hovering in the ether, floating lilies among the stars’.
• Review: Barbara Hannigan performs Erik Satie
John Luther Adams Songbirdsongs
‘These small songs are echoes of rare moments and places where the voices of birds have been clear and I have been quiet enough to hear,’ says John Luther Adams. This environmental activist turned composer has brought the living world into the concert hall, and vice versa. If meditation is about paying attention to the world, these miniatures do just that.
• John Luther Adams discusses his piece Become Ocean
John Tavener Song for Athene
Also known as ‘Alleluia. May Flights of Angels Sing Thee to Thy Rest’ features music by John Tavener and lyrics by an Orthodox nun, Mother Thekla. Sung a cappella, it’s probably Tavener’s most famous work, largely thanks to its performance at the funeral of Princess Diana.
The work’s original dedicatee, however, was not Princess Di but Athene Hariades, a young half-Greek actress and family friend tragically killed in a cycling accident. Tavener, who said of Hariades that ‘her beauty, both outward and inner, was reflected in her love of acting, poetry, music and of the Orthodox Church’, composed this serene, meditative work after her funeral. As well as incorporating works from the the Greek Orthodox funeral service, he also incorporates words from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as he had heard Hariades reading Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey.
Claude Debussy Images
Claude Debussy noted that he loved pictures almost as much as music, and much of his limpid, impressionistic music does convey, say, the play of light or water in the manner of his paintbrish-wielding compatriots Claude Monet, Edouard Manet and others. This is perhaps best heard in the six-movement suite Images, whose titles eloquently suggest the moods that the music conveys: from evocations of reflections in water (‘Reflets dans l’eau’) to the sound of bells as heard through the trees (‘Cloches à travers les feuilles’). In terms of music for meditation and mindfulness, the abstract ‘Mouvement’ might do the job best, but in reality this is an exercise in calm and contemplation from beginning to end.
It’s for music of such harmonic adventurousness and yet transcendental serenity that we named Debussy one of the greatest French composers, as well as one of the greatest composers of all time.
Beethoven String Quartet No. 15 / Opus 132, III: ‘Heiliger Dankgesang‘
You might not be expecting Beethoven, whom so often we associate with music of struggle, energy, might and heroism, to crop up in a list of best classical music for meditation and mindfulness. But there are many moments of great serenity, as well as of Titanic struggle or Promethean transformation, within the music of this great Romantic composer.
One such is the slow movement of his String Quartet No. 15, Opus 132. Beethoven wrote this (largely) tranquil movement after his recovery from a major illness of the intestine. At one time, this malady had looked to be fatal, so on his recovery he penned this hymn of thanks to God, which he called (deep breath) Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart. Which translates (another deep breath) as ‘Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity’, in the Lydian mode’.