Back in the early 1970s, Columbia Records president Clive Davis decided to capitalize on the tremendous popularity of offbeat keyboard virtuosos of the day: Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman were busy with their rock arrangements of classical favorites, Walter Carlos and Isao Tomita were busy “switching on” classical music by performing it on Moog synthesizers, and back at CBS veteran organist E. Power Biggs was working on an album of Scott Joplin rags played on the pedal harpsichord. Into this environment Davis launched one of CBS’s more unusual classical record careers. He took a young and brilliant wunderkind of the keyboard from California, who happened to practice Zen meditation and who had long hair and wire-rim glasses, and marketed him as the keyboard guru of the Pepsi generation. His name? Anthony Newman.
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Newman’s image then was carefully calculated for him. Photos and record covers rarely showed him wearing anything but denim. That and his lightning-fast interpretations of Bach harpsichord and organ favorites gained him enormous popularity with rock-oriented audiences, but many serious-music enthusiasts automatically dismissed him, seeing in him the crude virtuosity of a superhyped young upstart who was trying to impress his listeners by speeding through pieces.
Newman’s highly acclaimed 1985 book Bach and the Baroque: A Performing Guide to Baroque Music With Special Emphasis on the Music of J.S. Bach permanently laid to rest the notion that his performances are without scholarly and historical basis, and established him as an important early-music scholar with a gift for communicating pedagogical information in an entertaining manner. His reputation was enhanced when he published his detailed Schirmer editions of Bach works for performers seeking revolutionary findings about early music performance practices.
