The American pianist John Anderson – along with his Italian wife Pina Napolitano – set out in 2012 on an ambitious project: to democratize the recording industry for classical music. Through Odradek Records, select artists are choosing who may record with the company through a blind judging platform, ANONYMUZE.com. The company has since transformed itself into a pioneer within the grueling world of the recording business as it is unapologetically embracing Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Describing Odradek Records’ unique vision and business model, Anderson points out that in 2012 he had just finished his second diploma in twentieth century piano music with Bruno Mezzena (1927-2017) as his wife had a year before.
The interview with Anderson has been edited for length and clarity.
Ever since our... launch, Odradek has been at the nexus of music and technology. The future is AI, and we want Odradek to have a seat at that table
The project started from the need we felt for a solution for artists that was coherent with the facts of the day: already there was very little money to be made selling records, and they were and remain promotional tools; and already the means of recording, assembling, and distributing a record were mostly available to anyone who wanted to make the effort to do it themselves. We both wanted to make our first recordings (Pina made hers, which was very successful, the complete solo works of Schoenberg — she’s since gone on to record much of the second Viennese school to great acclaim). Again, this is largely thanks to Mezzena’s enthusiasm for this repertoire, as a pianist and even composer having studied under Italian composer Alfredo Sangiori (1894-1962), Schoenberg’s only Italian student. Given that we were relatively unknown pianists, and interested in performing relatively unpopular repertoire, and full of youthful idealism, and perhaps a little of the American entrepreneurial spirit, I thought we could start a little label for ourselves and our colleagues who shared similar approaches and circumstances.
When I say I wanted a solution coherent with what I saw as the facts at the time, given there was no money to be made, and that almost always it’s the artists who foot the bills for their own recordings (one way or another, via grants, sponsorship, or their own cash), we first decided that our new label should be a non-profit. (We’re usually in negative profit, as we co-produce the albums and help out as much as we can, normally at around 50 percent project costs, which we cover through a number of parallel activities.) This transforms a business negative into a moral positive – but it’s anyway a matter of fact shared by other labels no doubt.
What is more distinguishing is that we wanted to honor the lessons Mezzena instilled in us, to not look for external things, but devote ourselves entirely to just the music itself. And thus, the blind peer review process via Anonymuze, by which the roster members themselves blindly assess new applications for interest and merit and democratically vote for new members to the roster, who then themselves vote the next and so on. The goal has been to create an efficient but high-quality production chain that is cheaper than the ‘do it yourself’ approach, has broader reach, affirms quality, and that always tells a story, as a label, as a sort of artist collective (only in the artistic sense), and of each artist’s relationship with the music they record.
Cultural relevance
This review process has led to an interesting catalogue over the years, almost 400 albums produced (including several box sets), comprised largely of modern and contemporary music or anyway often underrepresented repertoire. As artists ourselves, we are the first to ask if the world needs ‘yet another recording of…,’ and as a result, we don’t usually have what I would term ‘vanity projects.’ Each album is culturally relevant and tells a specific story. Each album opens with an ‘artist’s statement’ that immediately states the relevance of the project.
I expected the label to be a small side project that we’d distribute only digitally, and just do a few projects per year: Instead, the idea caught on rapidly, our third album won a prestigious award from BBC Music Magazine, we were picked up for distributing worldwide, and I ended up never getting around to recording the album that I set up the label to do!
In terms of roster, we have big names and small names: the point is everyone passed through the same filter, which is a guarantee of quality for the public even when encountering a new name. I hate to offend by leaving people out, but I suppose some of what would be considered the big names would include Artur Pizarro (complete Rachmaninoff piano works, complete Beethoven concerti, Poulenc concerto, two piano four hand albums, a Schumann album), Michele Campanella (also multiple albums), Francois-Frederic Guy (two albums), Irvine Arditti with Roberta Pandolfi and Gianluca Pirisi, Franziska Pietsch (two albums), Muriel Chemin (complete Beethoven sonatas and Diabelli variations), Carion Wind Quintet (multiple), Vittorio Forte (multiple), Johannes Fleischmann (multiple), Ronaldo Rolim (multiple), Yuko Miyagawa, Chen Reiss, Will Liverman, Alexander Lonquich, Lutoslawski Quartet, Mettis Quartet, Janaer Philharmonie (complete Mahler cycle), Bamberger Symponiker, and several other orchestras. Not to forget Pina Napolitano, who has gone on to record many highly praised albums (including Times’ 2020 Best Contemporary Classical Album of the Year). More than having famous names or not, I’m proud of having a diverse roster and a diverse repertoire – again, not thanks to central planning, but just organically grown the way it has.
Our studio in Italy has also grown since our launch; from a living room to a space that can accommodate an orchestra. Over the years, we’ve spun off multiple side ventures, including for photo/video/web/app design (many Warner classical videos), an app with the complete Gregorian chant, which in itself is the largest recording project in history; a piano competition dedicated to Mezzena’s legacy; and a three-year-long project, Horizon Europe, which centered on AI and music. The Repertorium, which we built on novel stem separation, sound field reconstruction, optical music recognition, music information retrieval solutions, and digitized the world’s largest single collection of Gregorian chant manuscripts, four hundred thousand images.
We’re in the process of launching a new one, the Sonart, which is a music educational app allowing on-demand minus-one recordings of any recording. With our mastering engineer in Paris, we launched Lyken Labs, again focusing on AI for signal processing more generally.
Ever since our 2012 launch, Odradek has been at the nexus of music and technology. The future is AI, and we want Odradek to have a seat at that table. The end goal is to create an ecosystem of parallel services, related one way or another to the expertise of the team, that becomes self-sustaining and can maintain and grow the label for our artists. If we could make things free for our artists, we would. Hopefully that day will come.
All images are credited to Odradek Records.
