Is there any formal definition of what makes music “New Age”?
Hippy crap.
Celestial, spacey, un-formed, “other-worldly” sounds is how I’d describe it. It blows.
Wind chimes and wood blocks. See also most things played at “Single Woman with 34 Cat’s Candle and Crystal Shop”
Lots of airy synth.
As a Hippie Chick, I take great offense to this comment. “Hippy crap” is drums, pre 80’s rock, folk, bluegrass and/or celtic. I know no hippies who like new age music. You can’t plug in a synthesizer around a bonfire.
New age is for middle aged women who like synthetic bath salts. Definitely heavy on the synth, with the occasional whale sounds for good measure.
It’s yuppie elevator music and it does indeed blow.
[nitpick] pre 1975 rock[/np]
ko,
hippie chick, emeritus
It’s not universally guaranteed to be crap. I’ve got a rock’n’rollin’ heart, and yet there’s still room in it for Andreas Vollenweider’s “Book of Roses.” One of the very first CDs I ever owned, and one of the few I still have and listen to from those days.
That said, it does tend to be rather airy-fairy, with maybe more than a passing resemblance to elevator music (a quality it shares with certain sub-genres of jazz). Celtic influences of the more ethereal sort are probably also likely, though they’re going to be pretty vague to keep it from getting put in the Celtic/World bins.
Who knows. Genre’s not a lot more than something to tell the record store clerk what bin to put it in (and to confuse poor souls like me, who enjoy stuff that defies classification).
Hmmm, there’s a set list in my friend’s computer that’s listed as “New Age”, and nearly all of them sound distinctively different from the spacey, acoustic metal guitar, whalesong I previously (and partially correctly, I might add,) associated with New Age music.
These songs still had a lot of the slow guitars and synths, but added mixtures from smooth jazz and trip-hop. They definitely didn’t sound like elevator music. If they were produced differently, they might have, despite the driving beat behind them, but the beat was too pronounced in the mix (and too fast-paced) to be considered elevator music.
And while we’re at it, does anyone have any bands they can recommend in the genre I just described? I wouldn’t mind a few good CD’s with a New Age/Smooth Jazz/Trip hop fusion thing going on.
Okay then. Pseudo-hippy crap.
A lot of themes in the Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross soundtracks have a very New Age-type feel to them. (It’s one of the few bits of music I can study to: no distracting melodies that steal my attention.)
Hmm…I got a friend who said a piece of music is “New Age” whenever it does not adhere to traditional convention. For instance, a piano piece mixed with Arabian overtures – that’s not traditional, hence it’s “New Age”.
I’m sure that Hildegard von Bingen, Richard Wagner, and Black Sabbath would all be surprised to learn that they are “new age”.
I’ve always regarded New Age music as being ambient – marked thus if you listen to streaming radio.
It’s basically what everyone else has said. Its structure is that there’s no discernable structure, in that there’s no direct tune or hook. Unlike Top 40, a particular piece will never embed itself into your mind. It’s not supposed to.
I listen to it if I need to relax. Melodious white noise, if you will.