Ironically, I’m not a big fan at all of most music categorized as “New Age”. I found a distinct turning point in the early 80s, when New Age shops started popping up and the commercial promotion of New Age as a “lifestyle” really took off. At that point the music seemed to turn into unabashed vapidity. William Ackerman started the Windham Hill label in the 70s, in part to promote acoustic music as contrast to the kind of synthesized “Music from the Hearts of Space” poop that was to become the foundation of the New Age version of the hippie culture. A further irony is that the Windham Hill records were found in stores dumped into the same New Age bin as the kind of music it didn’t intend to be.
Just a musically illiterate’s take on things.