It has been called "aural wallpaper," "music for the Birkenstock crowd" and "yuppie elevator music." Its titles evoke a holistic, hot-tubbing world: Etosha -- Private Music in the Land of Dry Water, Aerial Boundaries, Nirvana Road. Although its composers include musicians prominent in the rock avant- garde, it is marked by a meditative aesthetic whose goal is often creative anonymity. A laid-back synthesis of folk, jazz and classical influences, it is called, by rough convention, New Age music. But what exactly is it?
"New Age music is the sound track for the movie of the mind," says English-born Rocker Eddie Jobson, formerly of Roxy Music and U.K. and now a leading New Age pianist and composer. "It is music that springs from a world culture," says Lucia Hwong, a Chinese American whose music turned up in the 1985 movie Year of the Dragon. Trying to define the style reduces Anne Robinson, a cofounder of the New Age record label Windham Hill, to "stringing words together that sound like an exotic disease identified by a German doctor. New acoustic classical jazz? New acoustic impressionistic music?"
However it is defined, New Age has arrived. Five years ago, few outside Northern California had ever heard of it, but today the unthreatening, alpha- state instrumental music is not only found in record stores across the nation but wafts from speakers in chic boutiques and fancy bookshops as well. Like its predecessors, Muzak and Mantovani, New Age music is easily disparaged. Yet music that relaxes need not be devoid of content. Bach composed the Goldberg Variations to ease the slumbers of an insomniac, and his contemporary, Telemann, wrote reams of Tafelmusik, music intended as background to dining. Quality is not necessarily restricted by function.
Though no firm figures are available, it is estimated that New Age music today accounts for up to 2% of record and tape sales. The percentage may seem small, but it compares favorably with that garnered by classical music. Windham Hill, the West Coast label that has become synonymous with the new style, last year grossed $25 million. In a hard-driving business, Windham Hill's success is anomalous, for the label is rarely heard on the radio, and it advertises only occasionally. Instead, it relies on word of mouth among its target audience of young white professionals. It must be doing something right: Pianist George Winston, perhaps the best known of its largely faceless roster, has been on Billboard's Top 40 jazz chart a total of 184 weeks with his album December, a user-friendly amalgam of Bach, Satie and Jazzman Keith Jarrett.
Last year a challenge to Windham Hill's hegemony sprang up with Private Music, a label founded by Peter Baumann, former keyboard player of the rock group Tangerine Dream. Two of Private Music's early releases are among the best New Age albums so far: Rock Violinist Jerry Goodman's high-flying On the Future of Aviation and the anthology Piano One, which features hypnotic solo performances by Jobson and Japan's Ryuichi Sakamoto, among others. "I like to ; describe the music as very visual," says the Berlin-born Baumann. "One important aspect is the absence of lyrics, which gives the listener a much wider range of associations."