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.
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.ĭuring 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 Cheikh Lô, Mali's Toumani Diabaté and Ali Farka Touré, and the Malian-Cuban collaboration AfroCubism. 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. 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." Nonesuch, wrote the Boston Globe a few years back, is "an oasis of artistic excitement. In a business filled with constant change, its leadership has been remarkably stable: two people-the late Tracey Sterne and, from 1984 to 2017, Bob Hurwitz-were at the helm for 47 of those years David Bither, who joined Nonesuch in 1995 as Senior Vice President, became President in 2017, when Hurwitz became Chairman Emeritus. 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 five decades to pursue a broad mission, including classical music, contemporary music, jazz, music theatre, traditional American and world music, popular and alternative music.