Making music with mindful lungfuls: a portfolio of compositions exploring the use of awareness and breathing in musical performance

This research project investigates the means by which mindfulness and meditation can be applied to musical composition. The topic initially arose as a result of the author’s unexplored interest in the connections that Buddhist and related philosophies have to music. It explores what kind of musical forms can be evoked through a variety of compositional approaches and performance situations which relate to awareness. After composing some works exploring this research topic with a more general approach, it became apparent that mindfulness as directed towards breathing is important in both meditation and musical performance on all instruments, wind or otherwise. This allowed the author to refine his area of study for the later pieces in the portfolio, in which the research question is directed explicitly towards using the qualities of a performer’s breathing and their mindful awareness of it as generators for musical action