Steve Schwartz wrote:

>Both Edson Tadeu Ortolan and Dave Lampson raise questions about New Age
>music, something I know very little of.  In what I *have* heard, I don't
>see common technical or musical threads.

I agree, it's quite a diverse classification.

>...  Now, it seems to me that there are several commonalities from one CD
>to another, but these are mainly non-musical -- mainly stuff in the liner
>notes that reminds me of what my more annoying hippie friends were saying
>in the Sixties to show they were sensitive.  But again as far as I can
>tell, this guff has little to do with the music itself.

Agreed, again.  In fact, I don't see much buy-in to the hard-core new age
lifestyle by most of the performers I listen to.

>So I wonder whether New Age is merely a marketing label, rather than an
>indication of something musically significant.

I think it's more of a de facto label.  New age philosophy has been
around for quite a while.  I'm certainly no expert in the history, and
I don't much buy into the philosophy, so take this with a grain of salt.
New age philosophy probably had it's modern beginnings in the fascination
in Western Europe with all things Oriental in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries.  As science-tinged mysticism became extremely popular in the
late 19th century, something of a semi-religious movement began to gain
momentum.  Many intellectuals and artists were influenced by the concepts,
though they may not strike us today as terribly "new age".  George Bernard
Shaw actually helped fund the first magazine titled "New Age" in 1906.  But
the current new age philosophy really came to the fore in the late '60s.
The writings of Carlos Castaneda helped to inspire interest among hippies
and the like.

As to the application of the label to music, my first recollections are
that it became prevalent in the late 70s and early 80s.  Specifically I
recall buying my first Windham Hill releases in about 1979/1980 and then
subsequently hearing these described as "new age".  Shortly thereafter
crystals became more popular, etc.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that it's a de facto label that's been
ap[plied to a wide range of musical styles and artists.  I gave some
indication of that range in my previous message on the subject.  In fact,
I think the label has simply been used to conveniently categorize just
about everything that doesn't fit into jazz, classical, folk, world music,
etc.  categories; a catch-all if you will.  Certainly for a while there in
the 80s and early 90s, marketing people used the cachet of new age to help
sell some artists.  But as you rightly observed, this doesn't seem to
really be an inherent part of much of the music.

Dave
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