Nonesuch Records

Nonesuch Records
File:Nonesuch records logo.jpeg
Parent company	Warner Music Group
Founded	1964
Founder	Jac Holzman
Distributor(s)	WEA International
Genre	new music, classical, world, jazz, musical theater, popular music, soundtracks
Country of origin	US
Official website	www.nonesuch.com

Nonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed through WEA International with business affairs handled by Warner Bros. Records.

Company history

Founded as a budget classical label in 1964 by Jac Holzman, head of the then-independent Elektra Records, Nonesuch Records has grown over the last four-and-a-half decades to pursue a broad mission, including classical music, new music, jazz, traditional American and world music, popular and alternative music, music theater, and dance.

In a business filled with constant change, its leadership has been remarkably stable: two people—the late Tracey Sterne and, since 1984, Bob Hurwitz—have been at the helm for 38 of those 44 years. Nonesuch, wrote the Boston Globe a few years back, is "an oasis of artistic excitement. When one picks up a Nonesuch CD, there is a sense of occasion, the feeling that the artists in question have been assembled not only as an exercise in star power, but as an exercise in artistic exploration."

Though the face of Nonesuch has changed dramatically in the years since Tracey Sterne was leading the company, the label has retained many of its most important aspects during its history. Above all, the label has always been at the forefront of contemporary classical music during both the Sterne (George Crumb, Elliott Carter, William Bolcom) and Hurwitz (John Adams, Steve Reich, Kronos Quartet, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Frederic Rzewski, Henryk Górecki) eras.

During Sterne's tenure, Nonesuch began the most ambitious series of world music recordings in the commercial record business up to that point, with its more than 100 releases from the Explorer Series; Nonesuch has since been active working with many of the leading artists from around the world, including legendary Brazilian singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso, the late Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla, Senegalese icon Youssou N'Dour, and, through its long-time association with World Circuit Records, the unforgettable recordings of the Buena Vista Social Club and Ibrahim Ferrer from Cuba, Senegal's Orchestra Baobab, and Mali's Toumani Diabaté and Ali Farka Touré.

In its early days, Nonesuch released landmark recordings of Scott Joplin's music that reached wide audiences and commissioned new recordings of songs by composers like Charles Ives and Stephen Foster. During the past 25 years, the label made important historical contributions with its George and Ira Gershwin Library of Congress series, classic piano roll recordings of George Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton, and the theater songs of Kurt Weill, Rodgers and Hart, Leonard Bernstein, and Vernon Duke.

Classical music has always been a major foundation of the label. During its early years significant recordings were made by Jan DeGaetani, Paul Jacobs, and Gilbert Kalish, among others; in later years, Nonesuch released many memorable albums by Richard Goode, Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Gidon Kremer.

In the past quarter century, Nonesuch also expanded into new areas of repertoire. It started recording jazz in 1984, with the now-classic World Saxophone Quartet Plays Duke Ellington, and through the years worked with Bill Frisell, Fred Hersch, Brad Mehldau, Pat Metheny, Joshua Redman, and John Zorn. The company has taken an active role in American music theater, including seven recordings of shows and soundtracks by Stephen Sondheim and all three major works by Adam Guettel.

The company has worked closely with the New York City Ballet and The George Balanchine Trust, releasing videos of many of Balanchine's most important ballets, as well as important works by Mark Morris, Paul Taylor, and Twyla Tharp. The company has been selectively involved with the soundtracks of a number of acclaimed television programs (The Civil War, Angels in America, The Wire) and films (Powaqqatsi, Wings of Desire, Requiem for a Dream, Kundun, The Hours, The Thin Blue Line, There Will Be Blood, Sweeney Todd). The company also made landmark recordings of film scores by Georges Delerue, Alex North, Toru Takemitsu, and Leonard Rosenman.

Finally, over the last decade, Nonesuch has entered into the adult and alternative pop worlds. Many of the world's leading singers and songwriters—including Emmylou Harris, Randy Newman, David Byrne, k.d. lang, Joni Mitchell, Brian Wilson, Shawn Colvin, Sam Phillips, and T Bone Burnett—have made important albums for Nonesuch during this period. And the label has begun recording a new generation of musicians, including Wilco, The Black Keys, The Magnetic Fields, Punch Brothers, Chris Thile, Laura Veirs, and Christina Courtin.

As a testament to Nonesuch's success in fulfilling its broad mission, in 2004, Nonesuch won Grammys in four different musical genres, including best classical album (and best contemporary classical composition-both John Adams), best alternative album (Wilco), best world music album (Youssou N'Dour), and best jazz ensemble album (Bill Frisell).

Early History

Nonesuch Records was conceived more than 40 years ago as an experiment in hip, '60s-style entrepreneurship. In 1964, Jac Holzman came up with an idea to create a budget classical music label aimed at the same youthful audience that was buying classic literature in paperback editions. As Holzman told the New York Times, "Classical records went for $5, and I put them out for $2.50. I liked $2.50 because it was the price of a trade paperback." Holzman didn't commission new recordings; instead, he licensed existing albums from small European labels and repackaged them for a US audience, commissioning artfully groovy covers regarded by some to be as collectible as the albums they contained.

Over the years, reports have suggested that the first year's worth of Nonesuch releases generated sufficient income to help support the pop side of Elektra and enable Holzman to sign such acts as the Doors and Love. At the very least, the fledgling Nonesuch was successful enough to prompt major label competitors to embark on their own similarly high concept / low budget classical lines for young consumers.

To bolster his operation, Holzman brought over Teresa "Tracey" Sterne from Vanguard, where she'd worked alongside label head Seymour Solomon. The Brooklyn-born Sterne had been a child prodigy. (In 2000, on the album A Portrait, Nonesuch paired a recording of performances she made as a teenager with a selection of recordings she supervised during her time at the label.) She pursued an adult career as a concert pianist before deciding to shift her focus to the business side of the classical music industry, first as a publicity assistant with Sol Hurok's concert-producing organization and then with Columbia Records, before moving over to Vanguard. Sterne brought as much passion and drive to her work behind the scenes as she did to her concert appearances; she was a brilliant, uncompromising executive who bonded deeply with the artists she signed, doggedly championed their music, and insisted that each element of a Nonesuch release adhere to the highest of standards.

Sterne was officially called the label's coordinator, but she preferred the title of editor. She carefully selected material from the European classical sources Holzman had cultivated and began to build her own roster of artists, culling talent from the contemporary classical and new-music circles of New York City. Projects she developed at Nonesuch routinely garnered critical acclaim and, on occasion, found serious commercial success.

Composer George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children, inspired by the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, sold more than 70,000 units, a remarkable feat for a challenging and brilliant modern piece from an avant-garde source. It was performed by the Contemporary Classical Ensemble (CCE) and featured mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, a close colleague of Sterne's who displayed an unflagging commitment to such pieces. (DeGaetani was also an influential teacher; Nonesuch artist Dawn Upshaw was one of her students.) CCE co-founder Charles Wourinen was commissioned by Sterne to create a piece for synthesized instrumentation; his resulting Time's Encomium won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1970. And a young musicologist who worked with Sterne, Joshua Rifkin, introduced Scott Joplin's music to a vast audience, resulting in the company's first million-selling record and igniting a passion for ragtime jazz in a mainstream audience.

Perhaps most significantly, Sterne established the Nonesuch Explorer Series, which presented indigenous music from around the world, beginning with field recordings brought to Sterne by inveterate traveler-musicologist David Lewiston and produced for disc by Peter Siegel.

This was "world music" at its purest-much of it, like the Balinese sounds on Music from the Morning of the World and Golden Rain, hitherto unheard in the West. (The former was inducted into the National Recording Registry of "culturally significant" sound recordings in 2008.) The Explorer Series was not simply an anthropological mission: Sterne considered the work to be on the same aesthetic level as that of any Western Nonesuch artist. The series found enthusiastic followers, including a counter-cultural listenership that employed pieces like the 22-minute long "Monkey Chant" from Golden Rain as soundtrack for their chemically altered armchair travels.

Milo Miles, the world- and American-roots music critic for NPR's Fresh Air, recently testified on the program to the series' impact:

When I was a teen-ager, every record store indicated that music from other countries was unimportant. Foreign music albums had cruddy covers. They were dusty and stuck in the back. The only people who bought them must have been immigrants. The Nonesuch Explorer Series changed all that. The covers were bright and lively, with intriguing art and a look of something both hip and professional. The terrific two-LP sampler could provide a first exposure to Indonesian gamelan, Japanese wooden flute, and African thumb piano.

And the San Francisco Chronicle said:

Flash back to the 1960s, when the Explorer Series began. Pioneers from Benjamin Britten to the Beatles had begun to steadily open our ears to what seemed like exotic sounds. Everyone, it seemed, was open to new ideas. In this atmosphere Nonesuch's Music from the Morning of the World exploded as a chart-topper in the 1960s, alongside the then-new Nonesuch recordings of songs and dances from Mexico and the Bahamas that inaugurated the series' recordings of overlooked music of the New World. This was all happening when most Americans thought Mexican music meant mariachis, when reggae was not a household word, when Andean flutes were not ubiquitous in soundtracks, when Cuban music was dying along with most of Cuban culture under Communism, and when Brazilian music was about to take over as the dominant influence in international pop. It is definitely cool to be reminded that the Grateful Dead's "I Bid You Goodnight" was a song Jerry Garcia first heard on the The Real Bahamas. There is a lot of learning, a lot of enjoyment in the Explorer Series. The mix of true folk music and fascinating local pop is one of the virtues of any batch of Explorers."

Holzman sold Elektra to Warner Communications in 1970. When Nonesuch turned 15 in 1979, critic Peter G. Davis wrote, in a New York Times article entitled "The Special Touch of Nonesuch," that the label "has always been run with the kind of personal touch that creates a flavor of autonomy and generates quality. Warner's enlightened 'hands off' policy has no doubt helped encourage this salutary effect, for it means that Teresa Sterne, who has guided Nonesuch's fortunes for most of its 15 years can more or less do things her way."

Sterne's strong guiding hand had cemented the reputation of Nonesuch with savvy listeners and critics, but her fastidious approach held less sway with the corporate heads. In December of 1979, merely months after Davis had lavished such praise on her stewardship, Sterne made headlines in the Times again: she had been abruptly dismissed from her job at the behest of Elektra chairman Joe Smith. Sterne expressed "complete surprise and shock" to a reporter, though she did speculate that weaker sales might have prompted the move. Her firing prompted an outcry from the label's artists and New York City's creative community at large. More than 2,000 people wrote to the head of Warner Communications in protest, and all of the artists on the label sent a signed petition to the New York Times objecting to her ouster. Change in Leadership

The label operated from Los Angeles for the next four years under the direction of Keith Holzman, Jac's younger brother. Many of the artists Sterne had signed, though disgruntled, chose to remain on the label without their mentor, perhaps because Sterne had done her job so well: There simply was no other label for these iconoclastic artists to go to.

The singular reputation that Nonesuch accrued under Sterne—and the tremendous potential it still held—was not lost on Warner Bros. Records executive and former Blue Thumb Records chief Bob Krasnow when he took over the chairmanship of Elektra Records in 1983. He decided to bring in the 34-year-old Robert Hurwitz, the young head of American operations for ECM, the jazz and new-music label that was, at the time, being distributed by Warner Bros., a deal Krasnow had brokered.

Hurwitz, a Los Angeles native raised, as he told the New York Times, in "a fairly evolved household as far as music was concerned," was himself a pianist who came to New York City at the age of 21, determined to either pursue a career as a musician or break into the record business. His first job was at Columbia Records, where he was hired as a publicity writer. At Columbia, Hurwitz met four people who would have a big impact on his career: Karin Berg, Manfred Eicher, John Hammond, and Godard Lieberson.

Berg, who would go on to become the first woman in the industry to be a significant A&R force, persuaded Columbia to hire him and was an important mentor. He met Manfred Eicher, the head of ECM Records when Eicher came looking for a distribution deal at Columbia; they hit it off immediately and Eicher told Hurwitz that he wanted him to run ECM's American company, as soon as he could find someone to release the records. Hurwitz got to know the great A&R man John Hammond well and spent time with Lieberson, the legendary head of Columbia; he was deeply influenced by the values and high standards they represented. Hurwitz continually looked to many of Lieberson's artistic (and business) values as he sought a new direction for Nonesuch.

True to his word, in 1975 Eicher hired Hurwitz, then 25, to run ECM in America. They worked together for nine years, and during that time Hurwitz began relationships with four musicians who would ultimately join him at Nonesuch: Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Steve Reich, and John Adams. During Hurwitz's first years at ECM, the company was wildly successful (it was the time of Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert, Chick Corea's Return to Forever, and the launch of Metheny's career), and in the late 1970s, every important American company was now interested in distributing the label. In 1978, the company was signed to Warner Bros. by Krasnow.

Krasnow took over Elektra in 1982 and brought Hurwitz over in the fall of 1984. (He had made the offer 20 years to the day after the label's founding.) Hurwitz was refreshingly low-key in his approach and demeanor, though his passion, knowledge, and authority immediately came through, no matter how soft-spoken the conversation might be. Krasnow, confident in his hire, encouraged Hurwitz to view Nonesuch as a tabula rasa; he would be free to pursue his own vision of the label. "Talk to me in five years," Krasnow, only somewhat facetiously, told him.

Perhaps Krasnow simply anticipated how busy Hurwitz would be. As Hurwitz now recalls, "The first two years were incredibly fertile. We were able to sign Steve Reich and John Adams, and start working with Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet, and John Zorn. It was a time when most of the classical divisions of major labels were asleep. They were so busy devising genre "crossover" projects and re-issuing catalogue on CD, still a new technology at that time, that few people were doing anything from an A&R point of view." In 1985, Nonesuch released Reich's Desert Music and Adams's Harmonielehre. A year later came Kronos Quartet's self-titled debut, Zorn's Spillane, World Saxophone Quartet's Plays Duke Ellington, and Sérgio and Odair Assad's debut recording. Of the label's past roster, classical pianist Richard Goode and soprano Teresa Stratas remained.

Hurwitz's initial signing of new-music mavericks mirrored the adventurous spirit that Sterne had established. But their sound and sensibility were radically, almost defiantly different. The recordings of Adams, Glass, and Reich, as well as the new-music aesthetic of Kronos, seemed to contrast sharply with the more cerebral, European-influenced new music favored in the early days of Nonesuch. (Adams and Reich are pictured at right with Hurwitz at the Tanglewood Music Festival in the summer of 1985 in a photo taken by Peter Clancy.) Hurwitz, who had admiration for much of the older Nonesuch's new-music perspective, was well aware of the conflict between generations, and although a few new recordings were released reflecting those older values—by composers like Carter, Leon Kirchner, and George Perle—he felt the future course was in the hands of musicians closer to his own generation, the music he loved the most.

More immediately, for the revitalized Nonesuch, these artists found a record-buying audience. "I think it's a wonderful irony," muses Hurwitz, "because the recording of new music is possibly the least commercially viable aspect of anything one can do in the record business. But all of our initial successes came out of that area." The first three Kronos albums sold close to 100,000 copies, an unheard of result from a string quartet playing modern music; their fifth, Pieces of Africa, sold close to 400,000 and was the number one record on Billboard's classical and world music charts simultaneously. Early Glass soundtracks of Mishima and Powaqqatsi sold more than 100,000, as did Different Trains and Desert Music by Steve Reich.

Finally, the now-landmark recording of Polish composer Henryk Górecki's Third Symphony sold more than one million copies, the highest selling album ever by a contemporary composer. Górecki's solemn and moving symphony, a minimalist hymn to the suffering of his native people in World War II, was performed by the London Sinfonetta and Dawn Upshaw. The reclusive Górecki had composed the piece in 1976, but it didn't appear on disc until 1992. Repeated exposure on Classic FM radio in London helped to propel the recording into an unprecedented #3 spot on the British pop charts. Emotionally affected listeners transformed Symphony No. 3 into a cultural phenomenon. Górecki himself speculated, "Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music … Somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing."

"These kinds of records not only gave us credibility," says Hurwitz, "they sent a signal out to the musical community about what we were doing. We got caught up in a wave at absolutely the right moment."

See also

• List of Nonesuch Records artists
• List of record labels

External links

• Nonesuch Journal
• Nonesuch Records discography (Karl-Michael Schneider)
• Interview with David Lewiston of the Nonesuch Explorer Series