New-age music's biggest stars mostly hated being called new age
When the Grammys launched a new-age category in 1987, its first winner, Andreas Vollenweider, said naming something timeless was ridiculous. Vangelis, Yanni, Harold Budd and George Winston all resisted the tag too. The genre is best understood less as a sound than as a purpose and a record-store shelf.
The music is meant to calm, lift or inspire, and people put it on for yoga, massage, meditation, reading or simply a quieter room. It can be acoustic, built from piano, flute, harp, guitar or instruments such as sitar and tabla, or electronic, leaning on long synth pads and sequencer runs, and often mixes both. Vocals were rare at first, though chants in Sanskrit or Tibetan styles and lyrics drawn from Celtic legend became more common. Even the Grammy screeners judge entries largely by intent.
Tony Scott's Music for Zen Meditation of 1964 is usually called the first recording of the type. Paul Horn followed from 1968, Irv Teibel's Environments series from 1969 to 1979 packaged natural soundscapes and Om chants, and Steven Halpern's Spectrum Suite of 1975 is credited with launching the movement. Flautist Dean Evenson was among the first to blend gentle music with recordings of nature. Influences ran wide, from minimalists such as Terry Riley and Philip Glass to Brian Eno, Pink Floyd and Keith Jarrett.
The industry ignored it at first, so musicians set up small labels and sold through bookshops, gift stores, health-food shops and mail order. Once those sales grew large in the 1980s, the major companies moved in. A Billboard writer in 1987 marvelled at how a genre nobody could define had broken through. Critics noticed the cynicism too: Kay Gardner complained that anyone with a home studio added crickets or ocean waves to guarantee sales.
Hence the grumbling. Budd joked that he reached for his revolver on hearing the term, and Vangelis said it let untalented people make boring records. Yanni insisted his music was energetic and aimed to engage rather than soothe. David Lanz offered the neatest diagnosis: it is the only musical category whose name is not a musical term. Artists proposed substitutes, including earth music, contemporary instrumental and adult alternative.
Source: New-age music
