Music & Arts is an American record label based in Berkeley, California.
Music & Arts is owned and operated by Music and Arts Programs of America, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to informal education in the arts, established in California in 1984. The label first issued original digital recordings of classical music along with historical recordings of live performances and broadcasts. Recording premieres of new music by Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, George Crumb, Henry Cowell, David Del Tredici, Lukas Foss, John Harbison, Lou Harrison, Leon Kirchner, Charles Wuorinen and other 20th-century American composers earned Music & Arts international acclaim. Some of these projects were supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund, various private foundations, and individual donors including Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter.
In 1989 new avant-garde jazz and traditional jazz (presented in original digital recordings as well as reissues) were added to its offerings. The label has released classical co-productions with the Eastman School of Music, Mills College, the University of Iowa Center for New Music, Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv (the central German radio archive), the Austrian radio system ORF 1, the German radio stations NDR, BR, HR, MDR, and DR, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
Estates of great performers that have cooperated with Music & Arts on projects presenting new releases from unissued archival recordings include those of the pianists Claudio Arrau, Robert Casadesus, Edwin Fischer, Walter Gieseking, Friedrich Gulda, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and Rudolf Serkin; the violinists Adolf Busch, Zoltan Szekely, and Joseph Szigeti; and the conductors Jascha Horenstein, Otto Klemperer, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Pierre Monteux, Carl Schuricht, and Bruno Walter.
Music & Arts is distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Naxos of America, Inc., in Australia by Mainly Opera, in Austria by Gramola, in China by Sunrise Music, in the Czech Republic by Euromusica S.R.O., in Denmark by Danacord, in Germany by Note 1, in Greece by Classical Disc Center, in Hungary by Rozsavolgyi, in Japan by Tobu Land System Co. Ltd., in Korea by C-sharp Media, in Mexico by Vergel Musical, in Poland by Gigi Distribution, in Sweden by Euroton, in Switzerland by Harmonia Mundi – Musicora AG, in France by DistrArt Musique SARL, in the the Benelux countries by Outhere Distribution, in Italy by Ducale S.n.c. Di Marco Matalon & C., and in the U.K. by Discovery Records.
The following are some jazz artists who have released new material on Music & Arts: Anthony Braxton, Tim Cobb, Marilyn Crispell, Andrew Cyrille, Joe Fonda, Georg Gräwe, Julius Hemphill, Gerry Hemingway, Larry Ochs, Ivo Perelman, Paul Plimley, John Rapson, Ernst Reijseger, the String Trio of New York, and Reggie Workman.
