Old “New Age” is New Again?

from the Amazon.com Web page for the new RIOPY album

Having received almost all of my college education during those notorious Sixties, I was struck by the extent to which the decade that followed the awarding of my doctoral degree was just as turbulent but with far less “public relations promotion.” At the beginning of the Seventies, electronic music had advanced from university laboratories to presence on Billboard charts. Computers were still unwieldy boxes that were far from portable, but the invention of the modem meant that you could use that big box without being in the room with it. From a musical point of view, Philip Glass and his colleagues had given their first major recital at the Guggenheim Museum in January of 1970; and Einstein on the Beach would be premiered at the Avignon Festival in the summer of 1976.

At a more popular level, Music from the Hearts of Space began broadcasting in 1973. The repertoire seemed to be organized around a quieter approach to minimalism than could be encountered in Glass’ music, frequently drawing upon electronic effects that were more suited to soothing than to provocation. Windham Hill Records was founded in 1976 and became a major platform for the rhetoric of quietude. Billboard initially classified its releases as “soft jazz” but then adopted the “new age” label. That label even became an “official category” in the Schwann catalogs. When John Schaefer began broadcasting his New Sounds program in 1982, new age music and labels such as Windham Hill rubbed shoulders comfortably with the more adventurous recording projects of Brian Eno and the repetitive intricacy of Glass and Steve Reich.

Now we have Jean-Philippe Rio-Py, currently performing as RIOPY (capitalization obligatory). Born in 1983, RIOPY seems to have been one of the forerunners of that generation that moved into the new millennium with a sense of pride in its collective ignorance of history. Thus, as I desperately hang on to my own capacity for historical recollection, I quickly realized that there was nothing on RIOPY’s latest album, Tree of Light, that I had not encountered in the Eighties. Indeed, after listening to this album twice, I found myself consumed with an intense hunger for the diverse breadth of Glass compositions, given such admirable presentation in the Glassworlds series of recordings that Nicolas Horvath has been releasing since 2015.

According to his Wikipedia page, many of RIOPY’s efforts have gone into advertising campaigns and movie trailers; and perhaps that is where he belongs, producing television content that I do my best to avoid.