Schoenberg's musical meditation on the doomed lovers of Maurice Maeterlinck's play sounded more like the Fourth of July.

Mr. Moravec, above, called it a "musical meditation" on the piece and considered it one of the best things he'd ever written.

Though this short musical meditation on the hymn tune "Ellacombe" begins with quietude and beauty, it soon devolves into film-scorish music with swelling violins.

And where former President Bill Clinton plays cards and President Bush turns to the treadmill, Senator Kerry strums his Spanish classical guitar in a kind of musical meditation.

The 30-minute work has five harmonically and thematically related movements that the composer calls "a musical meditation" on his favorite Shakespeare play.

And in a new book of musical meditations, "Piano Pieces," from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Mr. Sherman gives further insight into what makes his art distinctive.

Perhaps the most striking musical meditation in this volume comes in a famous letter to the editor and translator Axel Kaun, in German.

They dismissed her musical meditation on the murder of four American churchwomen in El Salvador as earnest and preachy.

"Contact," Susan Stroman and John Weidman's musical meditation on dance and love, is prompting the type of sales that make even producers get misty.

In 1931, French organist Marcel Dupré improvised and transcribed musical meditations based on fourteen poems by Paul Claudel, one for each station.