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New Age Music

New Age music is a genre of music that is meditative in function and style. Its purpose is psychological, as it creates a peaceful environment, providing a background for the listener to reflect, contemplate, rest and do light exercises. It cannot be compared to easy listening music, however, which is popular music that has a lyrical or romantic tune and uses soft and soothing orchestration. New Age is essentially instrumental music with light rhythms and repetitive, simple and harmonic melodies; there are no strident sounds or a heavy beat. Having little or no vocal arrangements at the start, it has evolved to include Sanskrit, Tibetan or Native American chants and lyrics in modern days.

New Age music developed from the musical experimentation of various composers in the 1960s and 1970s. The virtuosity of techniques inspired them to explore the contemplative nature of music. The musicians fused the electronic and the acoustic forms, two conflicting trends, to develop New Age music. Steven Halpern, considered the world's leading composer of "relaxing music”, paved the way for acceptance of the new sound. Unable to find a producer to record his music, he published and marketed his compositions as music for wellness and health. The style was further consolidated and influenced by musicians such as Holger Czukay, Popol Vuh and the Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, John Hassell, George Winston and others. When the music was introduced to the public on radio, it was called "space music" since it had some electronic quality in it, but was later popularized as "New Age music" by disc jockeys. Perhaps this was to connect it to the New Age, a broad spiritual-philosophical movement of the 20^thcentury, but the music and the movement were actually unrelated. It was more a marketing label to differentiate the music from mainstream instrumental music and to arouse the public's curiosity for the new genre.

Although New Age music was a greatly appreciated style of music in its beginnings, it became difficult to classify and lost its acceptance by musicians and the public. The confusion regarding New Age music began soon after the public first became aware of the style. The term New Age music became more widely known to the public by a record label Windham Hill Records, which was established by guitarist Will Ackerman who wanted a more acoustic New Age sound. The label came to be associated with New Age music even when artists who recorded with the label were not New Age musicians. In fact, their musical roots had more to do with other musical forms - classical, jazz, folk, bluegrass. Nevertheless, no one objected to the designation because New Age records were extremely profitable at the time. Soon, both producers and consumers were unsure about what constituted New Age music. In the 1980s, ethnic music, specifically Celtic music, which is a broad musical classification, was introduced into the New Age style. In the 1990s, New Age music splintered into different directions, making the genre virtually unidentifiable. Artists produced music similar to the traditions of New Age music but did not call themselves New Age musicians; their motives were far removed from the idealism of the genre. This made the marketing of New Age music a dilemma for record company executives who could no longer determine what New Age music was and what it was not.

The term New Age music has become meaningless in today's culture. A keyboardist, whose music may be classified as New Age by tradition, opined that the term had too much baggage and did not want to be associated with it. Record executives call New Age music Contemporary Impressionism or New Acoustic music, which, not surprisingly, is considered by listeners today as being something completely different from New Age music.

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