Foreigners Learning the American Music Business by Thomas Wolf

After coming to the United States, my grandmother Lea Luboshutz, her brother Pierre, Pierre’s wife Genia Nemenoff, and Lea’s son Boris Goldovsky, realized the extent to which, in America, music was a business.  Their lives might be devoted to high art, but to make a living they had to apply numerous non-musical, practical skills. Some were familiar – after all, they had been promoting themselves since childhood in Russia where the patronage system was crucial to their success. From an early age, they also knew the importance of getting good reviews and cultivating relationships with those in the press who wrote about them.  But in the United States, things were much more complex.

Lea arrived in the 1920s.  She had been fortunate that her initial linkage to the American musical landscape had come through the impresario, Sol Hurok, generally considered the country’s most important musical agent.  But she and others in the family soon realized that you couldn’t rely on a single manager for all your needs.  Performers were traded around as if they were commodities. My great uncle Pierre, who arrived in the 1930s and was soon touring with his wife, Genia, as the duo-piano team, Luboshutz & Nemenoff, learned of this kind of agent horse trading when Hurok sub-contracted him to Marks Levine, an agent for the National Broadcasting and Concert Bureau (NCAC).  And that was only the beginning of the complex web of relationships. Impresarios who oversaw national touring for their performers often worked through middle men who had exclusive jurisdiction over certain geographic areas.  To sell an NCAC artist in New England, for example, you worked through the legendary Aaron Richmond, who had an exclusive on the territory.

At the end of the food chain were the local buyers, each responsible for his or her own series or venue.  Unlike local buyers today who mostly work for nonprofit organizations that can fundraise in order to cover operating deficits, most local concert organizations in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century were commercial enterprises that relied almost exclusively on ticket sales to balance their budgets.  Artists like Lea, Pierre, and eventually, my uncle Boris, had to convince people that they were good bets to cover their costs.

At the same time that it was important to master the machination of the live concert business, radio had become a very important component to the success of a performer’s career. An artist who had a high profile on radio would likely sell more tickets when he or she performed in a concert venue – or so the logic went.  In addition, those who booked concerts could use radio to assess the playing of potential performers without having to hear them live in a concert hall.  Indeed, radio lent the same kind of credibility during the first half of the 20th century that television appearances did in the second half.

Here too one had to understand relationships and access the right contacts.  There were linkages between the big national managements that sold performing artists and the broadcast networks that transmitted their performances over the airwaves.  Columbia Artists Management was associated with CBS while the National Broadcasting and Concert Bureau was connected to NBC.  In an age when radio was at its peak, each member of the musical family – my uncle Boris Goldovsky especially – learned to cultivate those individuals who could provide access to the medium since it translated directly into robust concert tours.  Boris’ regular intermission features on the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts did more than anything else to cement his reputation as America’s “Mr. Opera” (as he was often called) and it led to many bookings for his touring opera company.

Then there were the record companies.  Lea made a fatal mistake in deciding she would not record.  She had all kinds of legitimate reasons for believing that recordings were inferior to live performances and though it did not hamper her career during her lifetime, it seriously impacted her long-term legacy.  Without recordings to extend her reputation, subsequent generations simply did not know anything about her. Pierre and Genia, by way of contrast, were particularly effective in making recordings at a time when the disks not only burnished a performer’s reputation but provided an important supplement to his or her income – a stark contrast to the situation today in which classical musicians, for the most part, realize virtually nothing from their recordings. By 1963, according to a printed program from Reading, Pennsylvania featuring Luboshutz & Nemenoff, the two had current recording contracts with the Vanguard, Everest, and Camden labels, and had also recorded for RCA Victor and Remington.[1]  Many households in small communities throughout the country owned a Luboshutz and Nemenoff record, an asset which was a boon to the local presenter trying to sell tickets to their concerts.

Perhaps most uniquely American were the touring networks – national franchises that pre-dated McDonalds and Burger King but were their classical music equivalent.  Brands like Community Concerts, the “All Star Series,” and the Civic Music Association were national chains, headquartered in New York with scores of local franchises around the US and Canada.  The New York office supplied talent, promotion, program copy, and a variety of other services. The locals purchased the talent and produced the events.  These networked systems were crucial to filling out tour itineraries. Indeed, when I was in charge of contracts for Boris’ opera company, I could see that fully a third of the bookings came through the Community Concerts network alone.  Boris had established friendly relations both with the New York office and with the various local administrators and committees that made the ultimate artist selections from the supplied menu.

Thus, there were many people at all levels of the profession with whom one had to foster positive relationships.  My Aunt Genia had a bulging address book which she updated constantly.  She cultivated friendships wherever she toured – her French accent and allure did much to charm people – and she spent much of her travel time writing letters in a practically illegible hand to those who presented them.  No concert presenter, no matter how unimportant, failed to receive a “thank you” note after Pierre and Genia appeared and several carried on correspondence with Genia throughout the year.  During the summer, when she was not on the road, Genia spent free time buying and wrapping small gifts, preparing them for mailing at holiday season.  I would visit her in her studio and see a table filled with such packages headed to presenters in places that to me seemed totally remote such as Fargo, North Dakota, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, or Calgary (Alberta), Canada.

Publicists, too, shaped the reputations of performing artists and each of the family members had worked to create a specific “image” well before the terminology had crept into the marketing lexicon.  It helped that they were foreigners who spoke with an accent at a time when high culture was considered something that came from abroad. 

All these things the family had mastered.  But there was one thing that they were not prepared for – the growing power of organized labor in the music business in the United States.  More about that in my next blog.

[1] http://www.soundfountain.org/rem/remlubnem.html (accessed May 14, 2015)