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New Age music
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New Age music is peaceful music of various styles, which is intended to create inspiration, relaxation, and positive feelings, often used by listeners for yoga, massage, inspiration, relaxation, meditation, and reading as a method of stress management or to create a peaceful atmosphere in their home or other environments often associated with environmentalism and New Age Spirituality.
The harmonies in new age music are generally modal, consonant, or include a drone bass.
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Encyclopedia
New Age music is peaceful music of various styles, which is intended to create inspiration, relaxation, and positive feelings, often used by listeners for yoga, massage, inspiration, relaxation, meditation, and reading as a method of stress management or to create a peaceful atmosphere in their home or other environments often associated with environmentalism and New Age Spirituality.
The harmonies in new age music are generally modal, consonant, or include a drone bass. The melodies are often repetitive, to create a hypnotic feeling, and sometimes recordings of nature sounds are used as an introduction to a track or throughout the piece. Songs of up to 30 minutes duration are common.
New Age music includes both electronic forms, frequently relying on sustained pads or long sequencer-based runs, and acoustic forms, featuring instruments such as flutes, piano, acoustic guitar and a wide variety of non-western acoustic instruments. In many cases, high-quality digitally sampled instruments are used instead of natural acoustic instruments. Vocal arrangements were initially rare in New Age music but as it has evolved vocals have become more common, especially vocals featuring Sanskrit, Tibetan or Native American-influenced chants, or lyrics based on mythology such as Celtic legends or the realm of Faerie.
History
New Age music has its basis in the work of 1960s European and American electronic and acoustic musicians exploring music for creating expanded consciousness. In the late 1970s, music began to be recorded specifically for the purposes of meditation and relaxation. During the early 1980s, the term "New Age music" was introduced more widely to the public by radio stations and then by music retailers and some record companies, as a marketing tag applied to a variety of non-mainstream instrumental music styles. Radio stations in major markets (such as "the Wave" in Los Angeles) defined themselves as "New Age", while playing some New Age music and using nature sounds in their station-id's, yet those stations also heavily featured styles musically and philosophically unrelated to New Age music, for example, Smooth Jazz. The first true New Age radio station in the U.S. was KLRS (Colours) in Santa Cruz, CA with a non-stop playlist of New Age music and is considered the first New Age station in the world. Most major cable television networks have channels that play music without visuals, including channels for New Age music, such as for example, the "Soundscapes" channel on Music Choice.
Definitions
New Age music is defined more by the feeling it produces rather than the devices used in its creation; it may be electronic or acoustic, or a mixture of both. New Age artists range from solo or ensemble performances using Western instruments such as piano, acoustic guitar, flutes, harps and many others, to electronic musical instruments, and Eastern instruments such as sitar, tamboura, tabla; and instruments from all other parts of the world, the human voice singing in languages from all around the world.
Some New Age music artists openly embrace New Age beliefs, while other artists and bands have specifically stated that they do not consider their own music to be New Age, even when their work has been labeled as such by record labels, music retailers, or radio broadcasters.
There is a significant overlap of sectors of New Age music, Ambient music, electronica, World music, Chillout, spacemusic and others. The two definitions typically used for New Age are:
- New age music with an ambient sound that has the explicit purpose of aiding meditation and relaxation, or aiding and enabling various alternative spiritual practices, such as meditative healing, chakra auditing, and so on. The proponents of this definition are almost always musicians who create their music expressly for these purposes. Prominent artists who create New Age music expressly for healing or meditation include Aeoliah, Deuter, and Steven Halpern.
- Music which is found in the New Age section of the record store. This is largely a definition of practicality, given the breadth of music that is classified as "new age" by retailers who are often less interested in finely-grained distinctions between musical styles than are fans of those styles. Music which falls into this definition is usually music which cannot be easily classified into other, more common definitions, but often includes well-defined music such as Worldbeat and Flamenco guitar. Musicians as varied as George Winston, Dean Evenson, Will Ackerman, Ray Lynch, Suzanne Ciani, Jim Brickman, Enya, B-Tribe, Deep Forest, Jean Michel Jarre, Enigma, Kitaro, Yanni, Oscar Lopez, Mike Oldfield, Steve Roach and Javier Ramon Brito are typically classified as New Age despite their wildly divergent musical styles. It also includes expressly spiritual New Age music as a subset.
Influences and themes
From 1968 to 1973, German musicians such as Holger Czukay (a former student of Karlheinz Stockhausen), Popol Vuh and Ashra released a number of works featuring experimental sounds and textures build with "electronics", synthesizers, acoustic and electric instruments, referred to as cosmic music, that provided early foundational influences for the ambient music and New Age music genres. In the late 1970s Brian Eno's defining explorations in ambient music further influenced the formation of the New Age music genre, as developed in the styles of musicians such as Robert Fripp, Jon Hassell, Laraaji, Harold Budd, Cluster, Jah Wobble.
In 1973, Mike Oldfield's unconventional progressive rock album Tubular Bells became one of the first albums to be referred to under the genre description of new age music. Other influences are early electronic music, classical music, ethnic music and world music. The minimalism of Terry Riley and Steve Reich (Indian influenced in the former case) can also be cited as an influence, along with artists like Tony Conrad, La Monte Young who utilized drones since the early 1960s. Connected to the creation of New Age music is the resurgence of interest in Gregorian chant during the second half of the 20th century. Now, New Age music has branched out and also includes chanting of "spiritual" or ancient languages, and includes, but is not limited to Sanskrit, Latin, Gaelic and Hebrew. Popular artists in this genre include Krishna Das, Deva Premal, and Bhagavan Das.
The solo ECM performances by artists like Keith Jarrett (especially his record The Köln Concert), Ralph Towner (especially his records Blue Sun and Solo Concert) and Lyle Mays's first eponymous album, are usually thought to be an influence on Ambient/New Age music.
The acoustic solo and group performances by the early Windham Hill artists such as William Ackerman, Alex de Grassi, George Winston, and Michael Hedges were called New Age for much of the last 30 years.
Popular themes in New Age music include space and the cosmos, environment and nature, wellness in being, harmony with one's self and the world, dreams or dreaming and journeys of the mind or spirit. Titles of New Age albums and songs are frequently descriptive: examples include Shepherd Moons (Enya), Straight' a Way to Orion (Kitaro), and One Deep Breath (Bradley Joseph).
Alternative terms
As described in this article, the borders of this genre are not well defined; however music retail stores will include artists in the "New Age" category even if the artists themselves use different names for their style of music. Here are some other terms used for "New Age".
Contemporary Instrumental: This is a term that may be used most often, and can include artists that do not use electronic instruments in their music, such as solo pianist David Lanz. Similarly, pianists such as Yanni and Bradley Joseph both use this term as well, although they use keyboards to incorporate layered orchestral textures into their compositions.
Adult Contemporary: This term, used by Jim Brickman; it is a type of radio format that plays mainstream contemporary pop music, excluding hip hop and hard rock; this music is intended more for adults than teens.
Contemporary Adult Instrumental: This term was suggested by Steven Halpern in the June 1999 issue of New Age Voice as an alternative catch-all label for music which is classified by retailers as "New Age", but which is not expressly spiritual in nature.
See also
External links
- Comprehensive online resource of music reviews and radio play rankings of New Age, Contemporary Instrumental, Acoustic, Neo-Classical, Electronic, Celtic, Ambient, Meditative, Native American, World CD releases that fall outside the coverage of areas of Billboard
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