New Age Music - Definitions

Definitions

New Age music is defined more by the effect or feeling it produces rather than the instruments used in its creation; it may be electronic, acoustic, or a mixture of both. New Age artists range from solo or ensemble performances using classical music instruments ranging from the piano, acoustic guitar, flute or harp to electronic musical instruments, or from Eastern instruments such as the sitar, tabla, and tamboura.

There is a significant overlap of sectors of New Age music, ambient music, classical music, jazz, electronica, world music, chillout, space music and others. The two definitions typically associated with the New Age genre are:

• New Age music with an ambient sound that has the explicit purpose of aiding meditation and relaxation, or aiding and enabling various alternative spiritual practices, such as alternative healing, Yoga practice, guided meditation, chakra auditing, and so on. The proponents of this definition are almost always musicians who create their music expressly for these purposes. Prominent artists who create New Age music expressly for healing and/or meditation include Paul Horn, Deuter, Steven Halpern, Dean Evenson, Lawrence Ball, and Karunesh.

• Music which is found in the New Age section of the record store. This is largely a definition of practicality, given the breadth of music that is classified as "New Age" by retailers who are often less interested in finely-grained distinctions between musical styles than are fans of those styles. Music which falls into this definition is usually music which cannot be easily classified into other, more common definitions, but often includes well-defined music such as worldbeat and Flamenco guitar. It also includes expressly spiritual New Age music as a subset. There are retail outlets, that specify subcategories such as Nature Sounds, Healing, Piano, Chants, and so on. Amazon includes also Celtic, Meditation, World-dance, and Relaxation, and iTunes Store includes Nature, Environmental, Healing, and Travel, besides other subgenres. The German new-age site Silenzio lists almost 70 subgenres.