[1][2]) On a flight from the Northeastern United States to Los Angeles in September 1969 or shortly before, he had sketched "a kind of theater piece for two pianos" titled Vision, and in March 1970 began to work out a score, but broke off after just three pages.

[3][4] During an automobile trip from Madison, Connecticut to Boston, a melody came to Stockhausen, along with the idea of expanding such a musical figure over a very long period of time—fifty or sixty minutes.

[5] Later in the year, on 22 September 1969 at the Couvent d'Alziprato in southern France, he had composed an intuitive music text composition, Intervall, for two pianists playing "four-hands" (on one piano), but it did not appeal to the Kontarsky brothers—especially to Alfons, who lacked the experience his brother Aloys had gained from performing text-pieces from Aus den sieben Tagen, as a member of Stockhausen's ensemble.

Intervall, eventually premiered by Roger Woodward and Jerzy Romaniuk, later became part of Stockhausen's second cycle of intuitive-music compositions, Für kommende Zeiten.

[1] After abandoning Vision, Stockhausen took up the melody he had jotted down the previous September and on its basis made a form plan and laid out the new work's skeleton between 1 May and 20 June 1970 in Osaka, Japan.

Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky gave the premiere of Mantra in Donaueschingen on 18 October 1970, and made the first recording of the work from 10 to 13 June 1971 at the Tonstudio Kreillerstraße 22 in Munich, for Deutsche Grammophon.

[8] The piece is the first determinate work (that is, the score is completely written down, though there are some passages involving a modest degree of improvisation) that Stockhausen composed after a long phase of indeterminate compositions.

[12] Though this mantra recurs constantly, the structure of the composition is not a theme and variations as found in classical composers such as Beethoven and Bach, because the material is never varied, only expanded and contracted (both in duration and in pitch) to different degrees; not a single note is ever added, it is never "accompanied" or embellished.