The Carpenter and the Piano Player
In 1976, William Ackerman was five credits short of a Stanford degree. He had left to apprentice under a Norwegian boat builder, then started a construction company, Windham Hill Builders, in Palo Alto. He also played fingerstyle guitar. When friends kept asking for tapes, he borrowed $300 and pressed his debut, In Search of the Turtle’s Navel, naming the label after his carpentry business. It operated from his living room.
Then George Winston walked in. His 1980 album Autumn, recorded over two days at The Music Annex in Menlo Park, was solo piano organized by season. DownBeat gave it five stars. More importantly, it sold. Within a few years Autumn was platinum, Windham Hill had a distribution deal with A&M, and Ackerman had left carpentry for good. By 1982 the label was selling millions.
Before the Name
The music existed before anyone agreed on what to call it. In 1973, Stephen Hill began broadcasting Music from the Hearts of Space on KPFA in Berkeley, a late-night program that eventually syndicated to over 290 NPR affiliates. Steven Halpern released Spectrum Suite in 1975, one of the earliest albums designed for healing, using brainwave biofeedback and galvanic skin response monitoring to measure what his music did to the body.
In Germany, Chaitanya Georg Deuter released his self-titled debut in 1971, recorded in a one-room studio with flutes, handmade percussion, guitar, and forest sounds taped outdoors. A car accident had redirected him from graphic design to music. He traveled to Pune, India, studied with Rajneesh, and produced meditation tapes fusing Indian classical motifs with synthesizers. By 1985 he had settled in Santa Fe, recording in a forest studio he shares with bears, deer, and his own beehives.
The term came from the spiritual movement. Musicians founded their own labels, sold through mail order, and stocked records in bookstores and health-food stores. In 1981, Tower Records in Mountain View added a “new age” bin. The industry had not created the genre. The genre had created its own industry.
The Sound
New Age is defined more by effect than instrumentation. The acoustic wing favored piano, flute, hammered dulcimer, and non-Western instruments like the koto and shakuhachi. The electronic wing relied on synthesizer pads, long sequencer runs, and cavernous reverb.
Kitaro, born Masanori Takahashi in Toyohashi, Japan, discovered analog synthesizers after meeting Klaus Schulze of Tangerine Dream while touring with the Far East Family Band. Schulze taught him modular synths; Kitaro brought spiritual sensibility. His 1980 album Silk Road, composed for the NHK documentary, fused Japanese modes with sweeping electronic orchestration and made him internationally known.
Suzanne Ciani studied composition at UC Berkeley, where in 1968 she met synthesizer inventor Don Buchla. She took a job at Buchla and Associates to earn money for her own Buchla 200. At the end of an employee training class, Buchla announced, “We’ve decided that we don’t want women in the class.” Ciani was the only woman present. She persisted, moved to New York in 1974 with nothing but clothes and her Buchla, and spent the 1980s designing sounds for Coca-Cola and AT&T before recording solo albums that brought Buchla synthesis into New Age.
Brian Eno was crossing Washington Square Park when he heard something that stopped him. Laraaji was playing an electrified zither, a modified autoharp with chord bars removed, amplified through a portable tape recorder. He had entered a pawnshop to sell his guitar and walked out with the autoharp instead, following what he called “inner guidance.” Eno dropped a note in his case. The result was Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980), positioning New Age alongside Eno’s ambient series as a parallel exploration of stillness.
Commercial Peak
By the mid-1980s, New Age was the fastest-growing genre in America. Three labels dominated. Windham Hill had Winston, Ackerman, and guitarist Michael Hedges, whom Ackerman signed on a napkin after hearing him at the Varsity Theater in Palo Alto in 1981. Hedges used two-handed tapping and slap harmonics to make one acoustic guitar sound like an ensemble. Narada, founded in Milwaukee in 1983, signed David Lanz and David Arkenstone. Private Music, started in 1984 by former Tangerine Dream member Peter Baumann, signed Yanni and Ravi Shankar.
Billboard added a New Age chart in 1988, a year after calling it “the most startling successful non-defined music ever to hit the public consciousness.”
The Grammy Problem
For three years, San Francisco record executive Fred Catero lobbied NARAS to add a New Age category. They resisted, worried it would “go the way of hula hoops and disco.” In 1987, the 29th Grammy Awards included Best New Age Recording for the first time. The winner was Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider for Down to the Moon, played on a modified electroacoustic harp of his own design. His response: “I don’t have any intention to label my music. It’s ridiculous to give a name to anything that is timeless.” Windham Hill had shunned the term. The genre’s first Grammy winner rejected its premise. Nearly every major New Age artist would insist they were not a New Age artist.
The Voice That Sold 80 Million
Enya, born Eithne Ni Bhraonain in Gweedore, County Donegal, became the genre’s commercial force through methods that should not have worked. Producer Nicky Ryan recorded her voice hundreds of times and stacked the takes into a one-woman choir. For Watermark (1988), at Orinoco Studios in London, he used two Mitsubishi 32-track machines, bouncing vocals without a sampler. No compressors on the entire album. Multiple Lexicon 480L reverbs provided the spatial depth. “Orinoco Flow,” named after the studio, spent three weeks at number one in the UK. Watermark sold eight million copies. A Day Without Rain became the best-selling New Age record in history. Career total: over 80 million records, making her the second-biggest Irish act after U2.
Decline and Rediscovery
Ackerman sold his half of Windham Hill to BMG in 1992; co-founder Anne Robinson sold hers in 1996. BMG merged Private Music into the label and relocated to Los Angeles. Michael Hedges died in December 1997 when his car skidded off a rain-slicked curve and down a 120-foot cliff driving home from San Francisco airport. He was 43. His posthumous Oracle won that year’s Grammy for Best New Age Album.
By 2000, the genre had vanished from mainstream view. Around 2015, a generation raised on vaporwave and lo-fi hip hop began digging through New Age catalogs. Japanese ambient music from the era found new audiences on YouTube and Bandcamp. Labels reissued forgotten cassettes. Music built for contemplation turned out to suit an anxious digital age.
Essential Listening
- George Winston – Autumn (1980)
- Kitaro – Silk Road (1980)
- Laraaji – Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980)
- Andreas Vollenweider – Down to the Moon (1986)
- Enya – Watermark (1988)
- Michael Hedges – Aerial Boundaries (1984)
- Suzanne Ciani – Seven Waves (1982)
- Deuter – D (1971)
- Steven Halpern – Spectrum Suite (1975)
- William Ackerman – In Search of the Turtle’s Navel (1976)
- Enya – A Day Without Rain (2000)
- Kitaro – Thinking of You (1999)