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.  Some of it sounds like Debussy,
some of it sounds like Glass, some of it sounds like Vaughan Williams, some
of it sounds like "Unchained Melody," and so on.  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.

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

Steve Schwartz