Each music genre can teach us something new. They tell us something about history, spirituality, and life. What we can learn from New Age Music? Here I will try to give a brief overlook on this very exciting topic – and give some tasteful examples too!
The first learning point is the easiest:
Relaxation: New Age music is often used for relaxation purposes, such as yoga, massage, and meditation. The music is designed to create a calm and peaceful environment that can help listeners relax and unwind.
Moving on to the New Age-y part:
Mystical perspective: New Age music is often associated with mystical matters and the New Age movement of beliefs. The music draws freely from religious traditions around the world with very little deference to the clarity of the traditions’ histories. This freedom can also be applied to the music structures, instruments, and timbres.
The next two are my favorites:
Creativity: New Age music is defined more by the use and effect or feeling it produces rather than the instruments and genre used in its creation. This means that composers have the freedom to utilize traditional instruments or synthesized versions of them with little relation to the musical context of their origin.
Artistic inspiration: New Age music is intended to create artistic inspiration and appreciation of goodness and beauty. It offers a peaceful vision of a better world and rarely dwells on problems with this world or its inhabitants.
And lastly, a very much overlooked but incredibly important aspect of our genre:
Cultural diversity: New Age music draws from a wide range of cultural traditions and instruments, including classical-music instruments, Eastern instruments such as the sitar, tabla, and tamboura, and electronic musical instruments,
In conclusion, New Age music can teach you about mystical perspectives, artistic inspiration, relaxation, creativity, and cultural diversity. It is a genre of music that is intended to create a calm and peaceful environment for listeners and is often used for yoga, massage, meditation, and other activities that require a relaxed state of mind.
In other words: we can all both learn and benefit from this incredible genre!!
Above picture by MALIZ ONG – License: CC0 Public Domain
Nice article BJ. In some ways integrating “art” with a new age perspective can be a challenge. For example the use of modulation (Key change), rhythm, disonance, harmonic challenges as well as risky melodic nuances help to define musical art. Music that pushes the boundaries. Music that takes risk. BUT, these things can also interfere with the desire to meditate, practice yoga, contemplate and just zone out. Combining art with beauty and connection can be a challenge. The cultural diversity you mentioned does seem very important and is what attracted me (I studied Ethnomusicology at university).
Thank you for an insightful comment, Paul. I’m always amazed by how much sound and expression that remains to be discovered when mixing cultural diversity and New Age music. In globalized world, such expressions will make it to the top of the charts. It might even be meditative 😁