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    R. Peter Munves, Master Marketer of Classical Music, Dies at 97

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    As an executive at Columbia and RCA Records, he popularized the classics for mass audiences by applying the same techniques used to sell pop music.R. Peter Munves, a record company executive who revolutionized the marketing of classical music, died on Aug. 19 in Glen Cove, N.Y. He was 97.His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his son Ben.Mr. Munves carved out a moneymaking niche in what for much of its history has been a low-margin, struggling industry, selling classical music to mass audiences by applying the techniques of pop music marketing.In the 1960s, while at Columbia Records, he created a series called “Classical Greatest Hits” that packaged bits of Brahms, Mozart, Bach and other composers onto single LPs. In 1968 he signed the electronic musician Wendy Carlos to record “Switched-On Bach” — pieces by Bach on the Moog synthesizer.Both ideas were big hits, commercially if not with the critics. Time magazine reported in a 1971 profile of Mr. Munves that the “Greatest Hits” series “scored a solid bull’s-eye in the market and rang up $1,000,000” in revenues. The “Switched-On Bach” album, Time said, was Columbia’s “all-time best classical seller.”In 1968, Mr. Munves signed the electronic musician Wendy Carlos to record an album of Bach compositions on the Moog synthesizer. It was said to be Columbia’s best-selling classical album of all time.Columbia/CBSIn 1981 Mr. Munves produced an album that compiled 222 well-known themes from classical music. One critic called it a “marketing masterpiece.”Columbia/CBSMr. Munves went on to produce an album called “Themefinder” — a compilation of 222 well-known themes from classical music that the New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein called a “marketing masterpiece” upon its release in 1981, adding that Mr. Munves was “an inspired producer.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mary Martin, Who Gave Many Music Stars Their Start, Dies at 85

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      Her loyalty to artists and her eye for talent made her a force in a male-dominated business. Among her accomplishments: introducing Bob Dylan to the Band.Mary Martin, a Grammy-winning talent scout, manager and record executive who helped start the careers of a long list of future legends, including Leonard Cohen, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell — and who introduced Bob Dylan to the Band — died on July 4 in Nashville. She was 85.Mikayla Lewis, a documentary filmmaker and close friend, said she died in a hospice from complications of cancer.Among the musicians whose work exists somewhere between rock, country, folk and Americana, Ms. Martin was a legend in her own right, widely respected for her fierce loyalty to artists and her keen eye for budding talent.“She saw the bumpkin in me, and she also saw something that was going to develop,” Mr. Crowell said in an interview. “She was one of those people who just said, ‘Shut up and let me show you something of the world that you may not have seen.’”Ms. Martin and Rodney Crowell in a scene from “Mary Martin: Music Maven,” a forthcoming documentary. Ms. Martin helped Mr. Crowell get his start. “She saw the bumpkin in me,” he said, “and she also saw something that was gonna develop.”Mikayla Lewis/ “Mary Martin: Music Maven”A chain smoker with a keen love of football, she seemed to know everyone, and she had a knack for being in the right place at the right time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jerry Bradley, Who Helped Remake Country Music, Dies at 83

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      A longtime Nashville executive, he was the driving force behind “Wanted! The Outlaws,” the 1976 album that sold a million copies and shook up the status quo.Jerry Bradley, a record executive who apprenticed with two of the most storied producers in country music — his father, Owen Bradley, and the guitarist Chet Atkins — before challenging that legacy and shaking up the industry, died on Monday at his home in Mount Juliet, Tenn., near Nashville. He was 83.His death was announced by Elice Cuff-Campbell, senior director of media relations for BMI Nashville. No cause was given.Mr. Bradley was best known as the driving force behind “Wanted! The Outlaws,” the groundbreaking 1976 compilation featuring music by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Tompall Glaser and Mr. Jennings’s wife, Jessi Colter.Rowdy and irreverent, the record was an out-of-left-field success, certified by the Recording Industry Association of America as the first million-selling album in the history of country music. It also ruffled the Nashville status quo, posing a threat to the hegemony of the smooth Nashville Sound associated with the work of Mr. Bradley’s father and Mr. Atkins.The term “outlaw” had been gaining traction in country circles since the early 1970s, when the publicist Hazel Smith and others started using it to describe the do-it-yourself, anti-establishment ethos of Mr. Nelson and Mr. Jennings. But it was Jerry Bradley, then head of the Nashville division of RCA Records, who had the foresight to package the emerging outlaw aesthetic and promote it to a wider public.That included modeling the album’s cover after a Western-style “most wanted” poster sporting mug shots of the four singers on the record. And in a nod to the outlaw movement’s younger, more rock-oriented audience, Mr. Bradley enlisted the Rolling Stone journalist Chet Flippo to write the liner notes.“The appearance and the marketing of the album were extremely important in making Nashville look hip for the first time,” Mr. Flippo said in discussing Mr. Bradley’s achievement in a segment of the 2003 BBC documentary series “Lost Highway: The Story of Country Music.”Mr. Bradley was the driving force behind “Wanted! The Outlaws,” which the Recording Industry Association of America certified as the first million-selling album in the history of country music.Building on the unprecedented success of “Wanted!,” Mr. Bradley would go on to sign future superstars like Ronnie Milsap, Eddie Rabbitt and the band Alabama during his nine-year tenure at RCA. Each of those acts would release numerous No. 1 hits for the label while reinvigorating the country airwaves with more wide-ranging pop, rock and soul sensibilities.Mr. Bradley also directed the careers of several established country stars while at RCA. He produced chart-topping late-1970s hits for Charley Pride and supervised the making of “Here You Come Again” (1977), Dolly Parton’s first million-selling album. He was even involved in Elvis Presley’s mid-’70s return to the top of the country charts after an almost 20-year absence, re-establishing his connection with his core country audience shortly before his death.“I wasn’t so much a musical leader,” Mr. Bradley said, assessing his legacy in an interview commemorating his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2019. “I was more of a coach.”Jerry Owen Bradley was born in Nashville on Jan. 30, 1940, one of two children of William Bradley, known as Owen, and Mary (Franklin) Bradley, known as Katherine. His father, a former orchestra leader, became one of the chief architects of the Nashville Sound through his work as a producer for the likes of Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn. His mother was a homemaker.Jerry graduated from Hillsboro High School and as a teenager raced sports cars at the Nashville speedway.In the early 1960s, after attending Peabody College, he began working at Forest Hills Music, the family’s music publishing company. He also started spending time at the Bradley’s Barn recording studio, where, under the tutelage of his father and his Uncle Harold (both are also members of the Country Music Hall of Fame), he observed sessions by the likes of Joan Baez, Brenda Lee and Dinah Shore and on occasion contributed to them.In 1970, eager to forge his own path in the music business, Mr. Bradley went to work for Chet Atkins at RCA, where he became a liaison with the label’s headquarters in New York. Three years later, when cancer curtailed Mr. Atkins’s activities, Mr. Bradley succeeded him as head of RCA’s Nashville operations.Mr. Bradley left RCA in 1982 and, after a brief hiatus, became general manager of the Opryland Music Group, which had recently acquired Acuff-Rose, the music publisher whose holdings included the catalogs of luminaries like Hank Williams, Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers. Not one to rest on his laurels, Mr. Bradley recruited a new generation of songwriters, including Kenny Chesney, before his retirement in 2002.Mr. Bradley in 2019, the year he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.Donn Jones/CMAA longtime board member of the Country Music Association, Mr. Bradley played a crucial role in the development of the CMA Music Festival. Held annually in Nashville since the early 1970s (when it was called Fan Fair), the event showcases some 400 artists performing for 100,000 or so fans over four days.Mr. Bradley is survived by a daughter, Leigh Jankiv; a son, Clay; five grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and a sister, Patsy Bradley. Connie (Darnell) Bradley, his wife of 42 years and a prominent executive in the country music industry, died in 2021. His marriage to Gwynn Hastings Kellam, the mother of his children, ended in divorce; she died in 2001.“Greatness doesn’t come through blood; it is achieved through action and invention,” Kyle Young, chief executive of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, said, reflecting on Mr. Bradley’s entrepreneurship at the Bradley Hall of Fame induction.“Jerry Bradley had his father, Owen, and his uncle, Harold, as north stars,” Mr. Young went on. “He understood that he could not imitate or reproduce their gifts or their manners. He would have to find his own path.” More

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      Ethel Gabriel, a Rare Woman in the Record World, Dies at 99

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      For much of her more than 40 years at RCA, Ms. Gabriel was a producer, overseeing “Living Strings” and other profitable lines.Ethel Gabriel, who in more than 40 years at RCA Victor is thought to have produced thousands of records, many at a time when almost no women were doing that work at major labels, died on March 23 in Rochester, N.Y. She was 99.Her nephew, Ed Mauro, her closest living relative, confirmed her death.Ms. Gabriel began working at RCA’s plant in Camden, N.J., in 1940 while a student at Temple University in Philadelphia. One of her early jobs was as a record tester — she would pull one in every 500 records and listen to it for manufacturing imperfections.“If it was a hit,” she told The Pocono Record of Pennsylvania in 2007, “I got to know every note because I had to play it over and over and over.”She also had a music background — she played trombone and had her own dance band in the 1930s and early ’40s — and her skill set earned her more and more responsibility, as well as the occasional role in shaping music history. She said she was on hand at the 1955 meeting in which the RCA executive Stephen Sholes signed Elvis Presley, who had been with Sun Records. She had a hand in “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” the 1955 instrumental hit by Pérez Prado that helped ignite a mambo craze in the United States.She may have produced or co-produced the album that contained that tune, but April Tucker, lead researcher on a documentary being made about Ms. Gabriel, said details on the early part of her career were hazy. Ms. Gabriel often said that she had produced some 2,500 records. Ms. Tucker said officials at Sony, which now holds RCA’s archives, had told her that the number may actually be higher, since contributions were not always credited.In any case, by the late 1950s Ms. Gabriel was in charge of RCA Camden Records, the company’s budget line, and was earning producer credits, something she continued to do into the 1980s.In 1959 she began the “Living Strings” series of easy-listening albums, consisting of orchestral renditions of popular and classical tunes (“Living Strings Play Music of the Sea,” “Living Strings Play Music for Romance” and many more), most of which were released on Camden. The line soon branched out into “Living Voices,” “Living Guitars” and other subsets and became a big profit-generator for RCA — which was not, Ms. Gabriel said, what the boss expected when he put her in charge of Camden, a struggling label at the time.“I’m sure he thought it was a way to get rid of me,” she told The Express-Times of Easton, Pa., in 1992 (too diplomatic to name the boss). “Well, I made a multimillion-dollar line out of it, conceived, programmed and produced the entire thing.”Ms. Gabriel with her fellow producers Don Wardell, left, and Alan Dell at the 1983 Grammy Awards. They shared the award for best historical album for “The Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra Sessions.” Ed and Nancy MauroThere were other profitable series as well. Ms. Gabriel was particularly good at repackaging material from the RCA archives into albums that sold anew, as she did in the “Pure Gold” series. In 1983 she shared a Grammy Award for best historical album for “The Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra Sessions” By the time she left RCA in 1984, she was a vice president.Yet, unlike the top male record executives of the era, she rarely made headlines. Ms. Tucker, an audio engineer, said she had never heard of Ms. Gabriel until one day she went searching to see if she could find out who the first female audio engineer was. She brought Ms. Gabriel to the attention of Sound Girls, an organization that promotes women in the audio field, and soon Caroline Losneck and Christoph Gelfand, documentary filmmakers, were at work on “Living Sound,” a film about her.Ms. Losneck, in a phone interview, said they had been hoping to complete the documentary by Ms. Gabriel’s 100th birthday this November.Ms. Losneck said Ms. Gabriel had survived in a tough business through productivity and competence.“She knew who to call when she needed an organist,” she said. “She knew how to manage the budget. All that gave her a measure of control.”Many of the records Ms. Gabriel made fit into a category often marginalized as elevator music.“It’s easy to look back on that music now and say it was kind of cheesy,” Ms. Losneck said, “but back then it was part of the cultural landscape.”Toward the end of her career, as more women began entering the field, Ms. Gabriel was both an example and a mentor. Nancy Jeffries, who went to work in RCA’s artists-and-repertoire department in 1974 and had earlier sung with the band the Insect Trust, was one of those who learned from her.“Being a woman and having ambition at a record company in those days was something that just didn’t compute with most of the male executive staff, but I was fortunate enough to land in the A&R department at RCA Records, where Ethel was established as a force to be reckoned with,” Ms. Jeffries, who went on to executive positions at RCA, Elektra and other record companies, said by email. “She had developed a couple of deals that, while they weren’t particularly ‘hip,’ generated a lot of income and financed some of the more speculative workings of the department. Lesson one: Make money for the company and they will leave you be.”Mr. Mauro summarized his aunt’s career simply:“She was successful early on when the playing field wasn’t level.”Ms. Gabriel, interviewed by The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1983, had a succinct explanation of her ability to thrive in a man’s world.“I didn’t know I was somewhere I shouldn’t be,” she said.Ethel Nagy was born on Nov. 16, 1921, in Milmont Park, Pa., near Philadelphia. Her father, Charles, who died when she was a teenager, was a machinist, and her mother, Margaret (Horvath) Nagy, took up ceramic sculpture later in life.Ms. Gabriel studied trombone in her youth and formed a band, En (her initials) and Her Royal Men, that played in the Philadelphia area. While at Temple she began working at RCA in nearby Camden putting labels on records and packed them before advancing to record tester.Ms. Gabriel at her home in Rochester, N.Y., in 2019. She had a succinct explanation of her ability to thrive in a man’s world: “I didn’t know I was somewhere I shouldn’t be.”Living Sound FilmAfter graduating in 1943, Ms. Gabriel continued her studies at Columbia University and worked at RCA’s offices in New York, including as secretary to Herman Diaz Jr., who led RCA’s Latin division. She spent a lot of time listening in on studio sessions, and by the mid-1950s trade publications were referring to her as an “RCA Victor executive.”In 1958 she married Gus Gabriel, who was in music publishing. The couple counted Frank Sinatra as a friend. In a 2011 interview with The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, she said that in 1973, when her husband was dying in a hospital, she walked into his room one day and found his nurses in a tizzy.“I asked, ‘What’s wrong?’” she recalled. “They said, ‘Oh, everybody got autographed pictures from Sinatra!’”Ms. Jeffries said that Ms. Gabriel had always mentored the women at the company no matter where they were on the corporate ladder. But her helping hand was extended to men, too, as the producer Warren Schatz found out when he joined RCA in the mid-1970s, as the disco wave was building.He had an idea for an album that might catch that wave, he said, and she came up with $6,000 to get it made. It was by the Brothers and included a song, “Are You Ready for This,” that became a dance-floor staple.“So Ethel basically started my life off at RCA,” Mr. Schatz said in a phone interview. Soon he was vice president of A&R, and she was reporting to him.“Whatever she wanted to do, I would just say yes to,” he said. “She was so calm, and so knowledgeable, and so self-sufficient.”Ms. Gabriel left RCA in 1984, in part, she said, at the urging of Robert B. Anderson, a former U.S. treasury secretary, who persuaded her to turn over to him her retirement package — more than $250,000 — so that he could invest it in the hope that the proceeds would finance future music ventures. The money disappeared, and Mr. Anderson, who died in 1989, was later convicted of tax evasion.Ms. Gabriel lived in the Poconos for a number of years before moving to a care center in Rochester to be near Mr. Mauro and his family. As she died at a hospital there, Mr. Mauro said, the staff had Sinatra songs playing in her room. More