New Age
New age music, a genre roughly defined by its spiritual resonance and relaxing qualities, has roots that stretch back into the early 20th century, as impressionist composers like Satie, Faure and Debussy began to craft music that had magical qualities and a lyrical component that lead the listener more into silence rather than into sound. Debussy's "Preludes" and Satie's classic "Gymnopédies" are just two examples of early new age music.
The sound of the genre took a radical leap forward when Tony Scott recorded his classic, Music for Zen Meditation on Verve Records in 1964. For many, this is a watershed record, wedding Eastern modalities and instruments (shakuhachi and koto) with saxophone and jazz scales. Sax player Paul Winter and flautist Paul Horn soon followed suit. The former united with the likes of Paul McCandless, Ralph Towner and Colin Walcott to form the Paul Winter Consort, whose debut record, Icarus (produced by George Martin), set a new standard for music that would soon earn the moniker "new age."
Across the Atlantic, the radical developments of postwar German technology began to seep into the arts. Artists like Tangerine Dream founder Edgar Froese and bandmates Klaus Schulze, Christopher Franke, Michael Hoenig and Peter Baumann plugged into the power of the synthesizer and explored fantastical and spiritual themes on albums like Phaedra and Electronic Meditation, which take the repetitive elements of trance music and infuse them with a heavy dose of electronics. From there, other European composers like Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre followed suit, creating atmospheric and innovative music that eventually morphed into new age.
From 1978 onwards, young American electronic composers like Robert Rich and Steve Roach began to create their own brand of space music. And not long after that, the likes of George Winston, Yanni, Suzanne Ciani, Kitaro and others brought the music to a more mainstream audience.
Now, new age music is as broad and eclectic as the various elements associated with it. From the trancey, global beat grooves of Cybertribe to the bluesy bajhans of Krishna Das to the healing sounds of Steven Halpern, it's a vast cosmos of globally inspired electronic, acoustic, environmental and vocal music that has become the soundtrack to an emerging paradigm of wholeness and unlimited human potential.
