Relaxing music is music that is played to help people meditate. It can have a specific religious content, but it has also recently been associated with modern composers who use meditation techniques in their composition process, or who compose such music with no specific religious group in mind. Music performed as a form of meditation is also included in the concept.
Composers such as John Cage, Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Lawrence Ball pioneered modern meditation music in the twentieth century by fusing meditation techniques and concepts with music. 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's Visions and Spells (a realization of Vigil (1976)) all require a meditation period before performance. R. Murray Schafer's clairaudience (clean hearing) concepts, as well as those found in his book The Tuning of the World (1977), are meditative.
Stockhausen describes Aus den sieben Tagen as "intuitive music," and the performers in the piece "Es" from this cycle are instructed to play only when they are not thinking or in a state of nonthinking (Von Gunden asserts that this is contradictory and should be "think about your playing"). Zen influenced John Cage, and pieces like Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for twelve radios are "meditations that measure the passage of time."
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