New Age Music

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Dan Coffey

The genre of calm, tranquil music known as New Age emerged from several conflicting trends in popular music in the 1960s and 1970s. It originated on one level from the electronic music (sometimes referred to as "space music") of the late 1960s. Itself a nascent musical form, electronic music was embraced by groups like Tangerine Dream, and incorporated into the music of progressive rock groups such as Pink Floyd and Yes. On another level, and slightly after the popularization of electronic music, New Age music grew out of the dissatisfaction of some musicians with the pervasive influence of technology in contemporary music. These musicians made an attempt to return to simpler ways of making music, and began writing and recording peaceful, unobtrusive pieces, mainly for acoustic guitar and piano. These two trends, paradoxically, combined to form what would be known as New Age music; in addition, the style was informed by other established genres like jazz and classical music, and by various forms of ethnic music, particularly Celtic. As a result of New Age's disparate roots, listeners, fans, and critics have always had difficulty in defining it, and record company executives have had similar difficulties in labeling and merchandising New Age recordings. Nevertheless, New Age music became very popular in the final two decades of the twentieth century, with many successful record labels devoted solely to releasing New Age music.

Much of the draw of New Age music lies in its functionality; it may be the only form of music to have a purpose beyond that of the enjoyment of the music itself. With the advent of all manner of self-awareness and higher-consciousness trends and fads floating about in the 1970s, and the increasing popularity of non-traditional ideas regarding health and well-being, this music, because of its characteristic placidity and lack of dissonance, became the soundtrack for the emerging "New Age" lifestyle. By the 1980s, New Age shops were quite common, and customers could buy healing crystals as well as books on diverse topics relating to concepts like "inner harmony" and "cosmic consciousness." Cassette tapes of relaxing music were also offered in these stores as aural companions for whatever New Age program the browser had embarked upon. This function, then, was what provided New Age music with its single unifying aspect: the ability to provide an appropriate relaxing soundscape for meditation or other restful, pensive pursuits.

The initial thrust of New Age was electronic, and the interest in it was mostly due to pioneering FM radio shows like Inner Visions and Music from the Hearts of Space, which began in 1967 and 1973, respectively. These programs showcased the synthesized music known then as "space music" and only later dubbed "New Age." In the mid-1970s, the confusion began when guitarist Will Ackerman started the infamous Windham Hill record label as a means of distributing his own music. Ackerman, and the other artists who were signed to his label, felt their music had little in common with the highly produced, highly synthesized music being recorded in the late 1970s, and sought to bring about a revival of acoustic music. It is ironic that Windham Hill, a record label with an aesthetic so opposed to that of the "space" and electronic music movement, ended up sharing the same shelf and record bin space with that very genre. Music released on Windham Hill albums was homogeneous in structure, if not instrumentation, and the strikingly austere cover art was always identifiable as a "Windham Hill cover." This meant that, when Windham Hill was widely recognized as a New Age label, all the artists who recorded with the label were considered, by extension, New Age artists, regardless of their classical, jazz, folk, or bluegrass backgrounds. New Age recordings became very commercially lucrative, even if consumers and marketers were unsure of what actually constituted "New Age music."

The profit margins and confusion increased with the introduction of ethnic music into the equation, a process that began to take place in the late 1980s. Celtic music (itself a very broad and vague category) was the most successful ethnic music to be affiliated with the New Age genre, an assimilation made possible by the success of Irish pop musicians Enya and Clannad, the group she occasionally performed with, who specialized in a breezy, ethereal type of music. The particular instruments used in traditional Celtic folk music appealed to the Windham Hill acoustic aesthetic and the mythology associated with the Celtic culture and history fit well with the mystical and spiritual characteristics of New Age music. Windham Hill and other New Age record labels like Narada and Hearts of Space started releasing albums with "Celtic" in the title with the (well-founded) assumption that sales would increase even more. Other ethnic music that found a home under the New Age firmament included Native American and Indian music, highlighted respectively by Douglas Spotted Eagle and U. Srinivas.

By the mid-1990s, the category of "New Age music" had exploded in countless different directions, making a once-confusing genre now impossible to define. British singer/songwriter Peter Gabriel's Realworld record label specialized in bringing together musicians from disparate cultures; more often than not, the results were similar to what had become known as traditional New Age music, but without the underlying ethos that initially defined it. Another parallel genre, spearheaded by Brian Eno, was ambient music, which also had its roots in early 1970s electronic experimentation. The difference between ambient and New Age was more subtle and, perhaps, academic. Ambient did not necessarily share New Age's lofty ideals, and had no extra-musical function. By the late 1990s, however, New Age music had changed from a musical genre whose practitioners saw themselves as part of a larger spiritual movement, to a marketing and merchandising tool for record company executives and music store owners who were not sure where to place recordings by artists who defied easy categorization.