Don
Robertson
by Mike Watson - Ambient Music Guide
Don
Robertson enjoyed substantial sales success in the early days of new age music
in the USA. He's a lifelong musician and multi-instrumentalist adept at many
styles, as well as a passionate music educator and a voluminous writer on music
history and culture.
Positive
music
Robertson
writes lucidity about the history of Western music, from medieval and baroque
music right through to modern electronica. His own concept of "positive
music" - which he says returned to Western music when the brutal Serialist
school was usurped my the American minimalists, progressive pop and new age -
is especially interesting because it shines a clear light on where his own music
comes from.
In his
book Music Through The Centuries he writes:
"Although anyone can make a CD
and call it "new age" music, there still has been a very active
thrust on the part of musicians to create music that is harmonious, stripped of
the discordant elements - the stress - that characterized so much of the music
of the 20th Century. I feel that minimalism and new age music are the two
currents of 20th century music that provide the lead-in for the 21st. The
minimalists, even though they moved from atonality back to tonal roots, for the
most part had not completely cleaned their music of the discord, the stress.
This is true for some of the neo-romantic composers also. It was the early new
age composers, like Iasos and Paul Horn, who moved out of the murky depths of
stress, that really grasped the reality of positive music, as well as some of
the very fine Celtic musicians, and some of the inspired native American
composers and musicians. The correct understanding of music as a healing force
is the actual - as opposed to commercial - heart of new age music.
In a
2004 interview he also said:
"The term positive doesn't just
apply to happy music. Sad music is positive too, if you think about it.
Sadness, happiness, joy, love, peace, these are all positive emotions, and
positive music conveys these emotions. Negative music, however, is music that
coveys negative emotions, such as hatred and anger."
Now, while Robertson's music may be
stripped of stress, it's far from being bereft of substance or dynamics; a crucial
distinction that elevates his classic ambient and synthesiser recordings well
above the earwash that usually gets labeled new age. Although he would later
abandon new age when the opportunists and money men moved in, it was a genre to
which he initially felt a powerful attraction, a natural home where he could
combine his spiritual inclinations, musical curiosity and - like fellow new age
traveler Hari Deuter - his tremendous command of melody.
New age
classics
His
signature ambient albums date from the early to mid 1980's, a time when new age
was still a cottage industry and the domain of genuinely independent DIY
musicians. During most of this period he lived in California's San Francisco
Bay area - a new age Mecca of sorts - and from this base found an audience on
the West Coast with help from local ambient radio programs like Music From The
Hearts Of Space and Musical Starstreams.
Although
in the late 1960's he released a curious experimental album for zither and
other instruments called Dawn (1969), he spent most of the 1970's not recording
music but studying it, specifically classical music. Then with encouragement
from pioneering new age music distributor Ethan Edgecomb, Robertson returned to
recording in 1979 and released Celestial Ascent the following year, the first
in a sequence of what would become some of new age music's most enduring albums
(current availability issues aside). On two long tracks - one in a major key
and the other in a minor - he plays an 80-string zither and improvises rich,
elaborate melodies over single chords. The music sighs and surges beautifully,
from almost whisper-quiet to dense walls of sound where the secondary tones
start to sound like ghostly vocal chanting.
Then
Robertson discovered synthesiser music - hearing Vangelis, Klaus Schulze and
Ashra for the first time - and the inspiration just poured out of him. Holed up
in his bedroom with a piano and recently acquired Minimoog synth and Roland
string machine he composed and recorded Resurrection and - a few years later -
Spring, two albums of wide-eyed, melodious wonder. The music on these records
mimics neither the old-school synth masters nor the better talents on the
Californian new age scene of the time. Instead Robertson takes a much more
personal route, fusing elements of classical and pop with ethereal ambient
sound. From the happy electro-waltz of "Dance" to contemplative drone
pieces like "Ships" and "Journey Into The Infinite", it's
stunningly pretty music grounded by superb musicianship and a sophisticated understanding
of harmonic progression. Around this time he also provided piano and zither
improvisations on Aeoliah's exquisite new age album Inner Sanctum (1981).
Falling
in between these two releases is the album Starmusic recorded in 1982, another
masterwork. It's a more overt exercise in cosmic spacemusic, this time
performed on the just-released Synclavia II digital synthesiser. Robertson's
inspiration was the Bay area radio program Music From The Hearts Of Space and
in fact the album is co-produced by that programs's host Stephen Hill. It's
long, droned-based tracks are intricate, melodic and awe-inspiring. There's
sometimes an organ-like quality to the chords that gives the album the sacred
flavour of Renaissance church music. Although Starmusic was released on
Robertson's own label DBR, in many ways it's a pointer to the core sound that
Hearts Of Space Records was founded on, the pioneering label that Stephen Hill
himself would launch a few years later.
By
1984, Robertson was tiring of the Bay area's new age scene. He returned to
Colorado but for a while traveled regularly to California and continued to make
music in the styles he'd been creating on the West coast. Celestial Voyager is
the best of these - recorded mostly in 1986 but not actually finished and
released until 2008. Some tracks echo the intricate patterns heard on
Resurrection and Spring, while others like the Eno-esque "Le Calme Et
l'Océan" are more minimal and feel slower, their breathing chords
stretched out over longer distances.
End of
an Era
By the
end of the 1980's, the West Coast's original new age music scene had largely
being replaced by a world-wide business model that trafficked in bland, safe
easily listening instrumental pop, jazz and light classical. Meanwhile the
music sections of new age bookshops and markets were soon dominated by
spiritless "relaxation" muzak. Robertson, in his own words
"disgusted and disillusioned", left the scene altogether.
Since
then his focus has mainly been on music education and the study and composition
of classical recordings in the "positive music" mode that he's been
championing since the 1960's. However he has still found time to record the
occasional new age/ambient album. Aum from 2009 is a fine example, a deeply
meditative work featuring gorgeous suspended strings, reverberating piano
notes, floating chorales and long, arcing clouds of synthetic sound.
There's
more albums in Don Robertson's discography if you want to dig deeper, as well
as a number of books and a large archive of his articles, all on his website at
www.donrobertsonmusic.com. Some of the albums listed above have still not been
re-released in CD or digital form, something that will hopefully be rectified
soon so that a new generation might discover this master of melody.
About the author
Mike
Watson (Mike G), founder of Ambient Music Guide
lives in Sidney, Australia and has been been playing and writing about ambient and related
music since his university days in the late 1980's.
