Archive for the ‘New Age Music Criticism’ Category

It is not the first nor the last time a reviewer will trash Yanni. Either you like him and his music, or you don’t. You might even hate everything Yanni. On the homepage of newspaper The Columbus Dispatch is a review of Yanni’s recent concert at Nationwide Arena, Columbus, OH. Reviewer Margaret Quamme writes:

Yanni has accomplished what few would believe possible: He’s upped the melodrama on his already none-too-subtle concert extravaganza by adding four supercharged voices. The result is a soup of overwrought sound washing over an increasingly stupefied audience.

But there are some comments that are at least a little positive:

The singers added their own, sometimes pedestrian lyrics to Yanni’s possibly mesmerizing and possibly annoyingly repetitive melodies. Most successful was Nathan Pacheco, in part, perhaps, because his lyrics weren’t in English, and so couldn’t be criticized, and in part because his operatic arias played off Yanni’s simple melodies and basic rhythms, rather than following them slavishly.

Read the whole review here.

Be also sure to check out the comments by readers that also attended the concert. They have another opinion about the concert.

That’s the question in this article in the Christian Research’s newsletter from 1989. It is an interesting read that shows the concern some people had when new age music became more mainstream in the late 1980s. The article starts with:

There can be no disputing that the increasingly popular and profitable “New Age music” has roots in the New Age movement — the identical names are not a coincidence. The trend began with jazz luminaries like Paul Horn and John Fahey seeking to create music especially conducive to New Age spirituality.

The possible connection to the spiritual new age movement was a bit scary. About Steven Halpern’s music we get this comment:

Halpern, who holds a Master’s degree in the psychology of music, was deliberately attempting to facilitate the development of “higher” levels of consciousness. This has remained a central goal for many New Age musicians today. Even Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider, whose records have sold in the millions, explains that the purpose of the tranquil sound is to “build a bridge between the conscious and the subconscious.”

Read the article here.

The book The New Age movement and the biblical worldview: conflict and dialogue (1998)‎, written by John P. Newport, includes a presentation of new age music. I quote:

A certain percentage of New Age music is composed with the deliberate design to alter consciousness, or to give the listener a pantheistic mystical experience, or to open up the individual to the influence of demonic spirits. From the biblical perspective, this New Age music can be dangerous

I am just hoping that this percentage is not very high. It sounds dangerous indeed!

But, on the bright side, the book includes a fairly lengthy presentation of our genre that is not all black and white. Read the book on Google.

Look at this clip:

What do you say to this? I think that if Mozart had used a sequencer (DAW) when composing, he just might have added a few whales and dolphins samples here and there

Source

I’m not surprised, I have seen it a thousand times before. But I find it interesting that a genre like new age music, that is so diverse and has so much to offer (especially when it comes to meditation and relaxation), is used as a  proof that something is too cute, corny or even false. In New York Times is an article by Alice Rawsthorn from the Milan furniture fair which was held last week. She reports that the furniture fair was a great success, even in the shadow of the current financial crisis. But she found something a bit negative to tell about too:

The most depressing sights in Milan last week were the seemingly endless eco-installations, typically featuring twee New Age music and digitally animated trees, and apparently bent on guzzling as much energy as pointlessly as possible.

And then she finishes the article with this comment:

From wiping robots that sweep across the floor like tiny clouds and clean it after detecting dirt with their sensors to a sofa that changes shape at the touch of a remote control pad, the results were pragmatic and optimistic, offering an enticing glimpse of a future in which design will help to improve our lives, hopefully without a note of twee New Age music.

It is fascinating, isn’t it? How the new age music, not the eco-installations with its energy consumption, seems to be the problem. But one thing is certain though; there will be notes of new age music on the furniture fair next year too. Hopefully louder.

Read the complete article here.