Recently we announced a variety of activities that would take place in 2024 to celebrate Nonesuch’s 60th Anniversary, from performances in late March at the celebrated Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, to exhibitions of artist portraits by our longtime friend and colleague Michael Wilson to a gigantic playlist put together by our Gregg Schaufeld that attempts to include a track from every Nonesuch release that is currently available digitally (you’ll need to set aside several days to listen even once). There are further plans that will be revealed as the year goes on.

But I would like for a moment to reflect on the contribution of the individual most responsible for what Nonesuch has come to stand for: Bob Hurwitz, who ran Nonesuch from 1984 to 2016 and was our Chairman Emeritus from 2017 to 2023.

Bob likes to say that he was in the right place at the right time when he was asked to take the helm at Nonesuch by Elektra Records Chairman Bob Krasnow. There was a sea change taking place in new music, with the emergence of composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass and John Adams; the introduction of radical new ideas for such bastions of classical culture as the string quartet, exemplified by the Kronos Quartet; a growing awareness of artists who did not hail from English-speaking parts of the world, including such great figures as Caetano Veloso and Astor Piazzolla; and a downtown NYC music scene coming into its own featuring young visionaries like John Zorn.

All true. But it was Bob Hurwitz—told by Krasnow to “come back to me in five years” with the evidence of what Nonesuch could become—who saw those changes and who built the foundation for a label that is to this day, 40 years after he set to work, a home for artists of vision across a vast musical terrain.

Nonesuch was originally Elektra founder Jac Holzman’s brainchild, opening for business in 1964 as a budget classical label. It was Tracey Sterne, the first head of the label, who chaperoned its initial golden era, creating a home for new music, ethnographic recordings, ragtime, and a classical repertoire that was not beholden to the warhorses. That era came to a sudden end in 1979 when Sterne was let go by the powers-that-were at Elektra … and it was five years later that new Elektra chairman Krasnow made his offer to Bob Hurwitz, who had run the American office of Manfred Eicher’s highly regarded ECM Records.

This is a personal story for me. I met Bob in the early 1980s when I was working for Elektra’s parent company Warner Communications. But we didn’t sit down and really talk until I learned that he had been offered the Nonesuch position, and after hearing his plans—he was going to be able to hire one person to join him in relaunching Nonesuch—I raised my hand to be considered for the job.

It didn’t happen—Bob hired Peter Clancy who was at his side throughout those decades at Nonesuch as head of marketing—but it began a friendship that ultimately took me to Elektra and then Nonesuch itself in 1995.

When I met Bob I had been listening closely to music since I was a teenager. I had played in bands, written about music, worked in the field (my first job was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). I had taken a position at Warner Communications as a writer in hopes of finding my way to one of its record labels. But it was Bob who helped give those ideas focus and purpose, and it was Bob who showed me what uncompromising passion looked like—and who proved that such a vision could be made real.

Running a record label presents unique challenges in every era, perhaps none more so than the digital present, with its all-consuming torrent of information, sensation, and diversion. But starting a label (or, to be accurate, re-starting a label) with fresh vision and seizing the opportunities that only in retrospect seem obvious … that is a rare achievement. And that is what Bob did at Nonesuch.

In 2017, to celebrate Bob’s accomplishments at Nonesuch, a concert was held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. That by itself is not an especially innovative idea. What made it unique was the extraordinary group of composers—including Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, Brad Mehldau, Laurie Anderson, Randy Newman—who composed new works for the piano in honor of Bob, who not only built the modern Nonesuch but also had the time and energy to continue to hone his skills as a pianist of ability and ambition. It says a great deal about the affection and esteem that all of those legendary figures had for Bob that they gave him such gifts.

I can’t compose music for Bob but I can pen a few words to thank him for his vision, his dedication, his unyielding standards of excellence, and his friendship. As he steps down from his role as Chairman Emeritus, I have every faith and expectation that our decades-long conversation will go on, that his work with some of Nonesuch’s most acclaimed artists will continue, and that his passion for the label he built will remain. But it is a moment that deserves comment because, at 60, Nonesuch is the musical home that it is largely because of everything Bob dreamed for it.

On behalf of the musicians and dedicated staff of Nonesuch Records, we would like to express our gratitude.

—David Bither
President