What is New Age Music?
(This is Iasos' response to one of the questions asked to Iasos by Michael Leuffen
for an interview in the German Magazine Groove
Nov. 6, 2013)
To understand the essence of "New Age Music", you must first understand the global New Age Movement , as a whole - since "New Age Music" is merely a subset of this.
To explain the New Age Movement, first a metaphor:
Imagine that the cycles of day and night on earth were not 24 hours, but 12,000 years. And imagine that the people were living in an era where the inhabitants were just beginning their transition from night to day - a transition which would take more than 500 years. The ONLY thing they knew, for their entire recorded history is night-time. But now - very gradually, very subtly - the light of the coming day was beginning to emerge. Who in this society would notice this gradual increase in light? Not everyone. ONLY the most light-sensitive people would notice this. They would yell out to everyone else "The LIGHT is coming! The LIGHT is coming!" and of course everyone else would think they were crazy, because they could only see the darkness. As the years progressed and gradually more and more light entered, more and more people were light-sensitive enough to notice this coming transition. So even MORE people were now proclaiming: "The LIGHT is coming! The LIGHT is coming!" And still, the less-sensitive majority, would think they were crazy and living in a fantasy. As the years progressed, the light of the morning would get progressively more obvious, and so gradually, a larger and larger % of the population began to realize that, yes, the Light was in fact coming. This was no longer a crazy theory, but now a fact. Until eventually, EVERYONE took for granted that the Light is here and it is now a bright morning.
If you replace the "morning light" of our metaphor, with the "higher spiritual vibrations of the Golden Age on earth", you will then understand what the New Age Movement is all about. Initially, (late 1960s and early 1970s) only those that were most sensitive to subtle high-frequency spiritual energies, were noticing that a "spiritual-Light" was beginning to emerge on our planet. As time went on, more and more people began to notice this, while the sleeping majority, simply dismissed all this as "crazy hippies", or people living in a fantasy world.
The New Age Movement on earth was composed of those persons that were spiritually-sensitive enough to notice this gradually-emerging spiritual Light on our planet. They were the fore-runners, the advance-guard, the path-makers, the harbingers - introducing to the rest of humanity the higher spiritual awareness that our planet was now beginning to enter into.
And as the leading-edge of this "spiritual awareness" on our planet, the people in this New Age Movement began to develop and make publicly available many modalities to help spiritually "wake up" the rest of humanity, and to help them get healthier, and to help them attune more easily to Spirit. And these modalities to "wake up" and to improve the lives of others covered many many fields of society, including:
So " New Age Music " began as merely one area of society, among MANY areas of society, where those that were most sensitive to this gradually-increasing Spiritual Light on our planet, were offering their specialty - music - to help others attune to this increasing spiritual energy and to attune to their own spiritual Higher Self.
As such, " New Age Music " broke away from many music conventions, such as:
lyrics, rhythm, the need to follow the [verse ==> chorus ==> verse] pattern, etc.
They even broke away from the "obligation" to have a recognizable melody!
As more and more people become sensitive to this emerging spiritual Light on our planet, the more the New Age Movement will merge and become one with and integrate with the mainstream society of our planet. And there are signs of this already starting to happen, as some terms that were initially limited primarily to the New Age Movement , have infiltrated into the mainstream society, and are now generally accepted terms in mainstream society.
Terms such as: karma, mantra, good vibes/bad vibes (sensing the subtle energies around a person or place).
Eventually the New Age Movement will become fully integrated and merged with mainstream society, just as (in our metaphor) eventually everyone was aware that the morning light was in fact a reality. And just as terms that were originally limited to the new age - such as "karma" and "vibes" - have now become mainstream terms. Yet another example: "health foods" - initially limited to new age demographics - have now become common place - even in large super-markets.
As this merging process continues, it is no surprise that the term " New Age Music " continues to broaden its meaning, to include more and more types of music -until by 1990 - it began to merely mean "miscellaneous music": Any music that does not fit any of the conventional music categories - like classical, pop, hip-hop, world, country, jazz, latin, etc - is merely thrown in to the "new age music" category.