A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Cover art for The Baroque Beatles Book by Roger Hane (C) 1965. 2009  Elektra Nonesuch Records In November of 1965, Nonesuch Records – a budget classical label founded by Elektra Records’ exec Jac Holtzman one year earlier – dropped The Baroque Beatles Book, a tongue-in-cheek crossover album featuring 11 of the Fab Four’s hit singles and a recitation based on John Lennon’s writing, including excerpts from In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. The Baroque Beatles Book was, as the 2009 reissue edition’s liner notes explain, conceived by Nonesuch founder Holtzman. The Beatles’ popularity was climbing to insane levels at a time when music from the Baroque era (c. 1600-1750) of art and music was also enjoying a resurgence in popularity (although that , perhaps, was not as intense as the wave of Beatlemania that swept over Western civilization in the mid-Sixties). As Joshua Rifkin, the (then) 21-year-old musicologist, pianist, and arranger, writes in his 2009 ess...

(C) 1970, 1987 Nonesuch Records/Warner Communications “Don t play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.” – Scott Joplin In November 1970, Nonesuch Records released Joshua Rifkin’s Scott Joplin Piano Rags, an album that featured nine compositions written in ragtime by Arkansas-born pianist-composer Scott Joplin (1868-1917). Rifkin’s album – the first of three such records – became an instant best-seller and helped kickstart the early ‘70s revival of ragtime that was epitomized by the use of Joplin’s rags in Marvin Hamlisch’s score for George Roy Hill’s comedy-drama The Sting.  Official Warner Music Video: Solace - A Mexican Solace “Because it has such a ragged movement. It suggests something like that.” – Scott Joplin on the derivation of the word "ragtime" Although the album only contained nine of Joplin’s rags, Rifkin’s spirited performance of the music that inspired the first musical craze in 20 th Century America became Nonesuch Record...