William Ackerman is one of the founding fathers of new age music.

The son of academics, he began studies in English and History at the prestigious Stanford University in California, but without any musical training. Ackerman was inspired by one of the great virtuosos of folk guitar, Robbie Basho, from whom he learned what would become the fundamental principle of new age: to express through simple melodies emotions that would otherwise be too complex to explain in words.

Music, in short, as the greatest metaphor ever invented by human civilization. Since melody is the way a musician captures an emotion in the form of sounds, music must above all be melody. On this ideological foundation rests his entire body of work.

Ackerman began writing music almost by chance, while convalescing from a work injury, as a complete amateur with no knowledge of instrumental techniques or harmonic rules. Seeing how much his friends appreciated it, he decided to promote his music through a company he set up, simply recycling the name of his construction firm, Windham Hill Builders. Thus (in 1975 in Palo Alto) Windham Hill was born.

His success was due in part to his use of simple tunings, which scholars considered crude, but which became a hallmark of much new age guitar music. In reality, Ackerman’s revolution lay in always seeking the tuning that best reflected his mood rather than his technical virtuosity, the tuning that could make the strings resonate with his state of mind. By defining that goal, Ackerman had, in effect, coined new age.

Improvisation, at the same time, became something prearranged: improvisation meant chasing inspiration at the moment the music was being composed, not when it was being performed. By exalting the moment of conception, Ackerman gave himself a freedom akin to that of the Romantic poets, and placed himself at the opposite extreme from the avant-garde (whether classical, intent on writing music as though it were mathematical theorems to prove, or jazz, which placed technique before emotion).

It is no coincidence that the first piano record published by Windham Hill was an album of music by Eric Satie: less cultured and austere than Debussy and Ravel, Satie was nonetheless more original and creative, determined to translate his emotions into sound rather than his theories about music.

The progressive folk school of Takoma, led by John Fahey—and to which Basho also belonged—was another fundamental influence, particularly in its highly personal, intimate, introspective approach to traditional folk music, often verging on stream-of-consciousness. Fahey’s long digressions, imbued with Eastern spirituality, and Basho’s ambition to create a classical discipline for the acoustic guitar, always rooted in Indian music, exerted enormous influence on all acoustic guitarists of the 1970s. Ackerman adopted Basho’s same technique, emulating the tonal chromaticism and the drones of Indian music.

At the same time, Ackerman’s music absorbed more spectacular elements of commercial music, in particular the airy, warm style of Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio, the group that in the 1950s sparked the "folk revival."

Ackerman essentially conceived new age as an almost natural step in the evolution of popular solo-instrument music. His was not a revolution, but a simple synthesis. The cornerstone of his harmonic project was emotion, not technique, not theory, and on that cornerstone the castle of new age still rests. His method consisted in finding one’s own true voice, regardless of its historical-critical value, and this would remain the method of every new age musician. Indirectly, in fact, Ackerman launched a "revolution," a peaceful revolt against the pedants of music, who since the beginning of the century had taken the bad habit of vivisecting compositions and/or performances.

Having parted ways with Windham Hill and retired to his new recording studio in Vermont, Ackerman later founded a new company, the Gang Of Seven, producing a series of recordings and videos of free monologues by various people—mostly ordinary folks from small towns in the heart of America, telling true stories of everyday life.

His first strictly acoustic and solo album was In Search Of The Turtle's Navel (1970), still in the style of Leo Kottke’s sentimental and provincial sketches, and therefore much humbler than Fahey’s transcendental sagas. From the breakneck honky-tonk of The Pink Chiffon Tricycle Queen and The Second Great Tortion Bar Overland to the pensive ballads Barbara's Song and Ely, once again nostalgia for the "good old times" and the simple life of rural America takes center stage.

It Takes A Year (1977) perfected that uninhibited, Spartan sound, finding the right balance between philosophy and photography, meditation and contemplation. If here we find the poignant, crystalline portrait of Bricklayer's Beautiful Daughter, there we find the autumnal reflection of It Takes A Year. The mood is lightened by a couple of lively Kottke-style interludes, in Townshend Shuffle and Rediscovery Of Big Bug Creek. The album also ventures into Fahey and Basho’s magical realms with the calm narratives of Impending Death Of The Virgin Spirit and The Search For The Turtle Navel, where the fairy-tale spirit and syncopated picking dominate.

After the melancholy and tentative Childhood And Memory (1979), Ackerman recorded Passage (1981) with an ensemble of violins, cello, and English horn, thus experimenting with a new pathos of the everyday.

This was the dress rehearsal for Conferring With The Moon (1986), a series of highly evocative romances for small chamber ensemble: the guitar melody of the title track is cradled in a cloud of echoes from lyricon (Chuck Greenberg of Shadowfax), violin (Charles Bisharat), and bass (Michael Manring); in Climbing In Geometry, violin and piano (Ira Stein) alternate with the main melody, with guitar and bass strumming in the background, just as the violin is the protagonist in the glorious song Shape Of The Land.

The scheme lends itself to reaching new heights of sentimentality in the delicate serenade Big Thing In The Sky, with the counterpoint of an English horn (Bob Hubbard), and in the tender watercolor The Last Day At The Beach, with piano (Philip Aaberg) and cello (Eugene Friesen) as accompaniment. Ackerman would never again attempt orchestrations more ambitious than these, like a traditional chef who distrusts flashy recipes and exotic ingredients.

His last albums, the bucolic Imaginary Roads (1988) and the eclectic Opening Of Doors (1992), closed in a dignified way the career of a musician by then devoted to business. The second album lives almost solely on lyrical visions like A Happy Home In Katmandu and A Movie Of A Placid Lake, much less on the metaphysical depth of its title track.

Most of Sound Of Wind Driven Rain (Windham Hill, 1998) is classic, vintage Ackerman, strumming his guitar in an intimate, domestic setting through humble melodic fantasias such as Shella's Pictures, Unconditional, Sound Of Wind Driven Rain I Know This River. The violin breathes a new life into Driving, while bass and English horn lull Pontchartrain into a jazzy mist. But the real news is the nine-minute Hawk Circle, not only because of its length but because of the African chanting, the percussion, the minimalist repetition, that evoke hypnotic Enya-like world-music.

Hearing Voices (BMG, 2001) is Ackerman's first collection of vocal pieces.