The Peddler

The record industry has few problems that R. Peter Munves thinks he cannot solve all by himself. An expert at what used to be called "appealing to lowbrow taste," now known euphemistically as making music "relevant," Munves is acknowledged by his peers to be one of the master salesmen and packagers of the record world. What makes him unusual is that his field is not rock, but serious music. "You can call me the P.T. Barnum of the classics," he says, with the modest air of a burlesque barker. "They've never had anybody like me." Quite so.

As director of merchandising for Columbia Records, Munves was the man who dreamed up that company's "Classical Greatest Hits" series--Bach, Brahms, Bernstein, just about anyone. The records did nothing for the purists, but they scored a solid bull's-eye in the market and rang up $1,000,000 in new and unexpected wholesale revenues for Columbia. Munves was also the first executive to turn on to Switched-On Bach, when almost everyone else at Columbia was turning off. Now, 2 1/2 years after its release, Bach on the Moog synthesizer is still No. 1 on the classical charts and ranks as the company's all-time best classical seller.

Vampire. Last October, Munves, 44, moved over to RCA as director of classical music and began applying his pop-oriented sales and packaging concepts to the company's Red Seal line. An engagingly brash, native New Yorker who got his start 22 years ago as a clerk in a Manhattan discount-record store, Munves approached Artur Rubinstein with the idea of a Rubinstein's greatest-hits LP. "You are a vampire," said the pianist, and refused. But Rubinstein did go along with a reassemblage of old items called The Chopin I Love. This month, Munves brought out eleven LPs in a new "Composers' Greatest Hits" series. One of the albums was devoted to Gustav Mahler, neatly capitalizing on the use of his music in Luchino Visconti's new film Death in Venice. Total sales so far: 100,000. In eight months, Munves has managed to boost RCA's classical sales by 40%.

Flashy salesmanship is necessary, Munves argues, because classical records have been on a downhill trip for years. Although the catalogue is more varied than ever, sales have been sagging, partly because the core of repertory, the standard 18th century and 19th century masterpieces, have all been recorded dozens of times. Between 1968 and 1970, industry-wide classical sales dropped from $76.1 million to $53.8 million, while pop music, spurred largely by the vitality of rock, soared to $1.1 billion. By and large it is the young who spend all that money. Given the right impetus, they are not necessarily averse to the classics--as proved by what Elvira Madigan did for Mozart's Piano Concerto, K. 467, or 2001: A Space Odyssey did for Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra. "If Elvira Madigan made Mozart a relevant experience for the youth generation," asks Munves, "why can't we make it happen for other composers?"

Other composers, for Munves, do not include serialists or the majority of post-Bartok contemporaries, who he feels have no mass-market appeal. "I simply cannot go on taking a bath for those guys," he says. "Only four or five of them are writing for the people. Like Lenny Bernstein. I think West Side Story is one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century because it combines the classics with the vernacular." Munves particularly mourns the disappearance of good old-fashioned melody. When he says, "It all started with that nogoodnik Schoenberg," he is having a laugh, but only partly. "The thing with music is that man has to see his own image in it," he says. "And man's image in music is melody."

Kinetic Experiences. The concept of man as melody is only a bit narrower than Munves' view of the acceptable repertory. A convincing case can be made that the classical-record industry needs to do a better job of selling itself. Yet what of the obligation of the record companies to music's future? Today they are delighted to issue Mahler's Greatest Hits. But where were most of them 20 years ago when Gustav needed them?

In fairness to Munves, it must be said that he is primarily a special man for a special job at a special time. And he knows it. "My strength is that I come from the stores. I'm a peddler." His task is first of all to ensure RCA's classical-record future, then worry about other things. Right now he has his ideas to play with: "I'm gonna live to see the day when we wrap a classical album in the same package with the Jefferson Airplane." He also lusts for the day when quadrasonic tapes and disks--the next step after stereo--will allow listeners to bathe aurally in "kinetic musical experiences." And then he has his search for eternal youth --or rather the eternal youth market. "The kids, they're gonna save us because they love beautiful things."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.