Meditating Through the Brass Instrument

Eglė Liutkauskaitė

This study examines the relationship between meditation and brass players' ability to cope with music-related mental challenges, as well as its effect on breathing. The results highlight that meditation could be beneficial for brass musicians, even though there were initial concerns that meditation might interfere with breathing during playing. The findings show that brass musicians might have additional tools for dealing with mental challenges without compromising their airflow and breath support. Future research could further explore brass-playing-specific meditations and tailor them to greater effectiveness. An experiment was conducted with two groups of conservatory brass players (experimental and control) to assess whether music-specific and general guided mindfulness meditations affect their ability to deal with music related mental challenges (MPA, negative self-perception and focus issues) and how they in particular affect participants’ breathing. The findings indicate that both types of meditation affect students’ abilities to deal with mental challenges in a positive way while mostly having either positive or no effect on their breathing and sound. The participants’ progress was assessed by using the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, the Mindfulness for Musicians Questionnaire, weekly forms evaluating MPA, negative self-perception and focus in different settings such as daily practice sessions, main subject lessons and performances as well as interviews. Furthermore, the Self-Experimentation Log suggests that aside from aforementioned benefits, one of the most visible short-term effects is enhanced focus that has been observed during practice sessions right after meditating.

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What is Meditation?

In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in the use of the terms "mindfulness" and "meditation". However, "meditation" is currently considered an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of practices (Matko & Sedlmeier, 2019). Given this, a brief overview of meditation as a general concept will be provided, and the exact type of meditation to be used in this research will be specified.

A Historical Perspective

Etymologically, the word "meditation" originates from the Latin word meditari, meaning "to ponder" or "to reflect on." Given the complex nature of defining this term and the lack of agreement on which exact practices it encompasses, tracing the history of meditation as a phenomenon is challenging. Depending on the definition, there are suggestions that meditation is as old as humanity itself. United efforts of cognitive scientists and archeologists have resulted in a hypothesis stating that group rituals and meditations around the campfire between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago helped our ancestors develop the working memory essential for human evolution (Rossano, 2007). Furthermore, it is suggested that fire–gazing meditation rewired human brain in such a way that enabled our ancestors to assign certain signifiers to the signified thus resulting in the development of language.

Even with a narrower definition, certain archeological findings suggest that shamanic guided meditation practices existed long before humans were able to document them in the form of writing (Eliade, 1992). However, most modern meditational practices are described in Vedic texts written between 800 BCE and 500 BCE (Sharma, 2015). It is also important to note that meditation was not exclusively an ancient Indian phenomenon; there is substantial evidence of its practice among Jewish, Taoist Chinese, and Buddhist Indian traditions, with the latter two documenting it around 600–400 BCE (Bronkhorst, 2014).

Types of Meditation

Having taken a short look at the history of meditation, it would be useful to specify different kinds of meditation as well. Certain surveys indicate that there may be hundreds of different meditational practices, however, according to Matko & Sedlmeier (2019), almost all of them belong to one of the 20 groups of techniques (Table 1):

Technique	Full description
Repeating syllables	Repeating syllables, words or phrases either mentally or loudly
Manipulating the breath	Voluntary manipulation of breath, e.g. reducing the strength of breathing or "pranayama" including holding one's breath
Contemplating on question	Contemplating on a spiritually important question (e.g., "Who am I")
Walking and observing senses	Walking and being mindful of sensory perceptions (movement of the feet, legs, clothing, air, hair, etc.), coordinating it with breath, if necessary
Lying meditation	Lying down and going into a state of deep relaxation while being fully conscious
Concentrating on energy centers or channeling	Concentrating on one of subsequent locations in the body/"energy centers" (e.g., abdomen, or chakra, dan tien), including "channeling energy" through certain pathways (e.g., spine)
Observing the body	Observing how bodily sensations arise without adhering to them
Singing sutras or mantras	Singing sutras/mantras/invocations, alone or together with others
Contradiction or paradox	Concentrating the mind on something contradictory or complex without thinking discursively about the contradiction (e.g., koan, mahavakyas)
Body scan	Scanning the entire body (e.g., body scan), including perceiving and releasing occurring emotions and tensions
Concentrating on an object	Sustained concentration on an object or a visualized object (e.g., kasina, geometrical pattern, picture of the master)
Meditation with movement	Carrying out predetermined, meditative sequences of movements
Sitting in silence	Sitting in silence (e.g., shikantaza)
Observing thoughts or emotions	Observing how thoughts or emotions arise without adhering to them
Breath abdomen	Being mindful of the rise and fall of the abdomen while breathing
Opening up to blessings	Opening oneself up to blessings and inspiration
Meditation with sound	Meditation with sound (e.g., humming, or singing bowls)
Cultivating compassion	Cultivating compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity, loving kindness (for oneself, friends, neutral people, enemies, the whole world)
Nose breathing	Being mindful of the sensations arising in the nose during inhalation and exhalation
Visualizations	Visualization practices (e.g., heart as an opening rose blossom, body expanding in all directions, combining inhalation and exhalation with visualizations of energy, light, smoke, etc.)