John Clement Anderson is the founder of the US classical, jazz, and world record label, “Odradek Records,” which celebrated 10 years of activity in 2022. In 2019, he established ODRATEK, a developer of cultural technology that supports the arts and touches the soul. In 2023, the Repertorium Project he co-authored was awarded a 3 million euro Horizon Europe grant. A collaboration among six European universities and partners from eight countries, Repertorium lays the groundwork for a general musical artificial intelligence, creating AI-based tools for cultural preservation (optical music recognition, music information retrieval, audio-to-score synchronisation) and classical musical diffusion (metaverse-ready immersive streaming of navigable 3D acoustic holograms). It also creates technologies that will underlie the next generation of musical education, permitting students to mute their instrument in a streamed mix and take their seats among the orchestra to practice at home, or to connect remotely with other musicians for low-latency live virtual jamming sessions in a common shared acoustic environment. It also sees the digitisation and safeguarding of the Solesmes musical paleographic archive, made publicly available for the first time through the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM, University of Oxford).
His projects include the white label logistics, marketing and distribution service Ghost-Label.com, the democratic blind evaluation platform for teams, ANONYMUZE.com, and the centralized biography management tool, B.io. During the COVID pandemic, he gained worldwide attention when his team published Neumz. This app presents the entire repertory of Gregorian Chant, offering recordings, texts, translations, and scores. It is the largest recording project in history, with over 6500 CDs worth of chants recorded. A further 2000 CDs worth of the chants sung in the Tridentine Rite form are being recorded through the Repertorium project.
In 2021, he founded vist.co kulturemanagement, a classical music creative marketing firm based in Hamburg, which regularly collaborates with major labels and world-renowned artists. In 2022, he published Micpedia, the world’s largest source for information on microphones, with specifications on almost 4500 models. He owns Studio Odradek “The Spheres,” a recording studio and events venue in Pescara, Italy. He also manages Ashlar LC, a property management firm dedicated to historical preservation and “adaptive reuse” in Kansas (USA). He produces the music for many of Odradek's classical discs.
His ideas on the future of the music industry have received the attention of major international newspapers, specialist magazines, and public radio programs, including invitations to speak at industry trade shows like Classical:NEXT. He is a voting member of the Recording Academy (Grammys) and an associate member of the International Artist Managers’ Association (IAMA). He has been a guest on radio and TV shows, including DW Arts and Culture, BBC3 InTune, RAI Radio 3, WDR3, SWR2, RTE1, SRF, and Deutschlandfunk Kultur, and has given dozens of interviews about the label and its projects to newspapers and specialist magazines worldwide.
John Anderson has two Master’s performance diplomas from the Music Academy of Pescara, where he studied with Bruno Mezzena. John met Mezzena in 2001 in a happy accident at the Ticino Musica Festival in Switzerland. Mezzena was a pupil of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Marguerite Long, and Tito Aprea. He became a vital influence on John musically, intellectually, and ethically. Before Mezzena, he had learnt music from Phyllis Olsen since he was four years old in his hometown, Lawrence, Kansas (USA), and, aside from occasional masterclasses with Byrnell Figler and some lessons with José Ramos Santana and Yakov Kasman, he studied exclusively with her until he left for university at Oxford. Soon after matriculating there, he began commuting to the academy diploma programs in Pescara, Italy, to begin his professional formation under Mezzena.
He "read" Music at Hertford College, and was very fortunate to have composer Hugh Collins Rice as his tutor, the other great influence on his life. He graduated fourth of his class in 2004 with a “First” in Music, and his year’s highest marks in performance and composition. While there, he served for periods as artistic director of the Oxford International Music Festival, president of his college music society, and conductor of the college orchestra.
After university, he moved to Italy to complete his diploma program with Mezzena. He received his first diploma with top marks in 2005. In 2011, he was awarded perfect marks, lauds, and “special mention” for his second performance diploma, concentrating exclusively on 20th-century piano repertoire. Meanwhile, he continued to study composition and analysis remotely with his Oxford tutor and in courses at the Academy in Pescara. Thanks to Mezzena and Collins Rice, he is a dedicated advocate for new and 20th-century music.
He performed in the USA, UK, Italy, Switzerland, and Russia and with various orchestras in Italy, the UK, and the United States, before seeking to record his first album, whereupon he instead founded Odradek Records. He never recorded the album, but he has gone on to record hundreds of others. He launched Anonymuze and Ghost Label in 2014, Odradek Jazz in 2015, B.io in 2016, Studio Odradek “The Spheres” in 2017, Odradek World in 2018, ODRATEK BV and Neumz in 2020, vist.co kulturmanagement GmbH in 2021, Micpedia in 2022, and Selsyn SL in 2024.
He is married to Italian pianist and Slavistics researcher Pina Napolitano (pina.com) and lives in Rome.
Last updated on March 8, 2024