Musical Meditation Quotes

With singing, you get lost in the music - I go into another world when I'm singing.

In a jazz atmosphere, the audience members were so quiet and respectful of the musicians that you felt you were almost part of a meeting at a church or a temple, where everyone was completely in tune with the sermon and what the whole event was about.

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine, but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.

Real music will make you more and more refined. It will become more and more silent. In fact, real music will help you to listen to silence, where all notes disappear, where only gaps remain. One note comes, disappears, and another has not come, and there is a gap. In that gap meditation flows in you.

Hence my insistence that music and meditation should go together. That adds a new dimension to both. Both are enriched by it.

Real music is not for wealth, not for honours or even the joys of the mind... but as a path for realisation and salvation.

During the songs, you transcend yourself. The best way to be in the performance is to be without pause and be essentially in the moment, in that moment of expression.

The closest place that I feel like I come to having religious moments is always musical.

When I play, I very quickly put myself into a light hypnotic trance and compose while playing, drawing directly from the emotions.

Finger-picking, in general, is a hypnotic thing. I feel like I'm more A.D.D. all the time, so the music has to be hypnotic.

I started realizing that music is the one area where I've always let go. When that saxophone goes into my mouth, I get into a space where I never think about the notes I've already played or anticipate the notes ahead.

I love exploring the hypnotic elements of music, and because of that there are very long tracks on 'Immunity.'

My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing.

Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.

Music for me is a bit more spiritual. There are moments when I'm sitting at my piano, and I don't realize that I've been playing for two hours - it feels like divine power. I know it's so cheesy.

It is a process of discovery. It's being quiet enough and undisturbed enough for a period of time so that the songs can begin to sort of peek out, and you begin to have emotional experiences in a musical way.

Even when I haven't played in a while, I can sit down and start with a chord, and just drop into it. It's like this tunnel I go into. The zone is where I want to live.

What we have to get clear to kids is that when you offer your stillness and open yourself to the experience of music, it pays you back more than you give.

When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique sense of peace.

I don't meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing and composing as meditative acts.

You can realise God as you progress in music; nothing in between.

I've written a very long piece of music recently, the 'Veil of the Temple,' which lasts about seven hours. It's really a kind of vigil. It takes place during the night, waiting for the resurrection of Christ.

Just the same way I'd say a prayer before going onstage, taking that even further and using the drum to inspire people. And using that as a vehicle for the intention.

For me, playing music is like meditating - I just play and don't really think about what I'm doing, I just let it happen.

We groove off of everything, any sort of live show. The inner dialogue you're having with yourself, between you and the music, is for me the search for God.