OUR MISSION is to bring exposure to classical musicians, performers and composers, who have received little recognition, yet whose work is nonetheless superb and to do what we can to preserve our classical music heritage.

CLASSICAL MUSIC is generally neglected, and is not well-represented when one looks at its industry totals. Nevertheless, there are many more people involved in classical music then meets the eye.

Americus Records announced itself last autumn [1996] with two CDs and a manifesto. The latter item, really a modest brochure, sets out the company's ambitious cultural agenda. "Despite the fact that forming a new classical record company is a risky venture, especially in these competitive times, we believe that classical music is such a very important part of our culture that it needs more support than it currently receives in order to survive," reads the document. This means not only that consumers should support a new little independent label by purchasing its releases, but that the label itself will channel some of its profits into educational and philanthropic programs.

The ambitions are grand, but the details are still in their formative stage. After all, before Americus can begin giving money away, it must turn a profit. That is the first challenge facing the company's president, John DesMarteau, and it's a job he knows will be much more difficult than simply printing a brochure full of high ideals. DesMarteau's advantage is his enthusiasm, the special blend of commitment and sheer guts peculiar to recent converts. Living near Washington, D.C., he is neither a professional musician nor a recording engineer, but an anesthesiologist - a specialty that requires him to perform critical tasks somewhat in the background, rather as he hopes to apply the proceeds from his modest label to maintaining our cultural equilibrium.

"My musical background is all amateur; I'm practically self-taught," says DesMarteau. "I knew almost nothing about music until 1990, when I decided to take guitar lessons. I was trying to learn classical guitar at the age of forty, and it was just too difficult. So I started piano lessons instead. Then it dawned on me, being a Mac user, that I might be able to do something with composition on the computer. So I bought one of the early music notation programs, called Encore, and started doing composition. My lessons were with a neighbor and a pianist in Baltimore named Michael Habermann (probably known best to Fanfare readers for the Sorabji recordings), and I studied composition with David Gaines, who was completing a Ph.D. in composition in Baltimore. I'm basically self-taught in harmony. I put myself through Walter Piston's book. I maintained my sanity when I finished it, too. I also have a number of friends who are semiprofessional musicians. They don't make a living at it, but they did give me a lot of encouragement.

DesMarteau progressed enough to be admitted to a master class given by Alfred Brendel on the Beethoven sonatas. There he met Eugene Barban, the head of the piano department at Winthrop University of South Carolina. Barban told DesMarteau about an annual master class held at his school by Walter Hautzig, a Viennese-born American student of Artur Schnabel. DesMarteau attended Hautzig's calls, and the two became friends. Not surprisingly, Hautzig is featured on the first Americus release, the Beethoven sonatas, and the Variations for Piano and Cello with Hautzig's longtime friend and collaborator, cellist Paul Olefsky (AMR 19961001).

All this musical exposure came at just the right time in DesMarteau's life. "I'm forty-seven, and I know that I can't do anesthesia forever," he says. ''It's very demanding because of the stress factor and the reflexes it requires. I thought I needed to gear up to do something in retirement, so I started this record company, and as our first release I chose some music that Walter and Paul Olefsky had already recorded." Americus will produce some of its own recordings, but it also welcomes master tapes from its chosen performers, who will primarily be college music-faculty members, whom DesMarteau describes as the "often neglected heroes of classical music." DesMarteau praises Hautzig as an Earl Wild sort of Romantic pianist, one of the few left. "He certainly wouldn't win a competition today with his style of playing," DesMarteau says.

Hautzig provided the lead for Americus's second album, featuring the Israel Camerata, with which the pianist had concertized. The ensemble was planning its first American tour, but had no commercial CDs with which to promote itself. So the group and DesMarteau decided on a disc containing two works from the tour repertoire: Schubert's Symphony No. 5 and Dvorak's Serenade for Strings. "I put that program together," says DesMarteau. "It struck me that these two pieces actually have a lot in common-it's the style of the melodic lines. I'm calling this album Two Lyrical Composers."

Other forthcoming releases-the company should offer ten releases a year, when it's at full speed-will include Hautzig in an all-Schubert program; Barban with an all-American piano collection (Barber, Bolcom, Dello Joio, Gottschalk, and Lees); and New York City composer Matthias Kriesberg's Chronosymphonies for orchestra and amplified string quartet, featuring the Arditti Quartet. A Bach harpsichord album is also being prepared. ''Joseph Stephens, my friend in Baltimore, was connected with Glenn Gould for a long time, in a medical way," says DesMarteau. "I believe he was his psychiatrist. Well, starting in the early 70s, Joe did fourteen recitals in Baltimore in which he played all the keyboard works of Bach. They were recorded, and we're just releasing one CD from all that, the creme de la creme. It's going to be an album you'll either hate or like a lot. It's a very different album, akin to Gould's interpretation of the Goldberg Variations. Joe thinks most harpsichordists will hate the playing. From my standpoint, the thing that's most fascinating about this album is that Joe is able to coax many different sounds from the harpsichord. A lot of harpsichord albums have a sound that's the same through the whole album. There's one piece where he really takes advantage of the lute stops, and you'd swear it's not a keyboard instrument being played."

Much else is in the planning stage. "We're considering a large cycle of American songs by people other than the famous three," says the good doctor. "Paul Olefsky and I were talking about doing some cello works. Michael Habermann is currently finishing his Sorabji opus super magnus or whatever he calls it, and he and I were talking about an album probably of Central American or South American music. He spent some time in Mexico, where he became familiar with a lot of that, especially the music of Ponce. I've got some other ideas that are very peripheral right now maybe some unrecorded eighteenth century music with the Budapest Camerata, and probably an album of Smetana dances with a Czech orchestra, but I'm not sure which one." He's also interested in a series of CDs that would contain some of the 258 chamber orchestra works commissioned by Paul Sacher-a treasury of music by nearly every great composer of this century.

Yet there's more to Americus than a release schedule and artist-and-repertoire decisions. DesMarteau promises to donate fifteen percent of all net profits to foundations supporting classical music; to sponsor competitions for senior high school art students to design album covers, then award a scholarship to the winner and twenty-five cents from the sale of each of those albums to the student's high school's music program; to fund composition competitions; and to host free interactive orchestral concerts for middle- and high-school kids.

DesMarteau admits that "Right now the fifteen percent of the net profit is zip. But if we ever get to the point where we're making serious profits, we want to fund serious concerts like those that Leonard Bernstein used to do, talking directly to the audience about the music, and at the end we'd give each child a CD. You've got to give them something to take home, because their parents may not ever take them into the classical music section of a record store."

Funding for the albums at this point is coming mainly from DesMarteau's own pocket. But he is considering recording orchestras in Latvia and Hungary, and approaching expatriates from those countries for financial backing. DesMarteau bemoans the fact the classical music forms a minuscule percentage of worldwide record sales, but believes that Americans would be receptive to the music's charms if only they had greater and more meaningful exposure to it. "We're living at a frenetic pace," he says. "I have a number of friends who are not classical-music enthusiasts, but they drive home in the country's worst traffic here around Washington, D.C., and a lot of them put on classical music in the car to relax. It's almost like having a psychiatrist. It's a great stress reliever. It takes them to a place where there is some degree of meditation. And it's not just adults who are receptive to this. I work with fifty people, and they're all more or less middle-aged, and their kids are in high school, and they tell me that when the kids are doing homework they're listening to classical music." But DesMarteau would prefer people not simply to zone out to Zelenka. "I would like people to understand what the people who wrote the music had in mind. Few of them did it strictly for commercial purposes; there's a lot more to music than that. And I think a large number of children would respond to classical music if they were exposed to it in a non-snobby approach. Dragging them down to the Kennedy Center and making them sit through a symphony is the wrong approach. At the Grammys a few months ago, Maxim Vengerov was playing one of the movements from, I think, a Shostakovich violin concerto. I wasn't paying much attention, so I don't remember exactly what he was playing, but what struck me was in the Presto movement he broke his bow-that's how hard be was working at it-and somebody had to hand him another one. Now, that Grammy audience is basically made up of popular music people, but when he was finished that whole audience leapt to its feet instantly and gave him a standing ovation. That shows that this music is very powerful. It can reach all sorts of people, but somehow we've never gotten it out to the people. The big record companies take whatever money they can get out of the business, and they don't promote classical music. The money needs to be put back into our children. At the concert halls the audiences tend to be grayhairs, and if that continues there won't be many more concerts. This is too great a cultural treasure to lose."

To visit the Americus Records Web site, which includes artist information, liner notes, and audio clips, point your browser to http://www.americuscd.com.

© Fanfare March/April 1997 Page 81-84.