Books catch the ear

Even people who know a lot about classical music may be surprised to find that Mozart recycled a song he had just written into his “Jupiter” Symphony.

Want proof? You can hear it in David Hurwitz’s “Getting the Most Out of Mozart: The Instrumental Works,” published by Amadeus Press. And if the idea of listening to a book seems odd, you might as well get used to it. The Hurwitz volume is just one in a growing number of music and dance books that come with CDs or DVDs attached.

“This is the format of the future,” says Amadeus Press publisher John Cerullo. “It’s going to bring classical music and opera to a younger and fresher number of people.”

The idea isn’t entirely new. Hal Leonard Corp. has been publishing music-related book-and-audio packages since 1970. (Cerullo, in fact, is the former executive vice president of the company and currently publisher of Hal Leonard trade books as well as of Amadeus Press and Limelight Editions.) Leonard has issued more than 5,000 titles, mostly instructional volumes aimed at aspiring instrumentalists or singers.

University presses have occasionally included CDs in their books too. But while a few are marketed to the public, they’re aimed mostly at academic readers.

Amadeus, by contrast, is trying to reach a broad audience. It has two series -- “Unlocking the Masters” and “Parallel Lives” -- that take readers through the works of specific composers, with CDs accompanying the texts providing an immediate opportunity to test the authors’ ideas. In addition to Mozart, there are books devoted to Mahler, Wagner and a pairing of Ives and Copland, among others.

Amadeus also publishes stand-alone volumes, such as David Dubal’s encyclopedic “The Art of the Piano: Its Performers, Literature, and Recordings,” which comes with a CD of rare piano recordings, as well as books aimed at children.

The idea, says Cerullo, is that with a book-and-CD or book-and-DVD combo, you get a lot more than either component could provide on its own.

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” agrees Daniel Segal, president of Pacific Palisades-based FictionSpin Publishing, which recently released Segal’s late wife’s autobiography, “Memoirs in Toe Shoes.” (Erna Segal died in 2003 at UCLA Medical Center while awaiting a liver transplant.) The book comes with a DVD showing a segment from a 1957 “Ed Sullivan Show” in which she appears as half of the then-popular dance team Chiquita and Johnson.

“As much as you can explain her dancing to people,” her husband says, “when you see it, it really makes a tremendous impact.”

Indeed, dance studies would be especially well suited to this new format. Unfortunately, the situation is not all roses for publishers, who face difficult licensing and marketing issues.

“To get rights was a very long, very costly process,” says UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance director Judy Mitoma, editor of “Envisioning Dance on Film and Video,” which has been called “invaluable” by Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt. “Some people were willing to give us a break. Some I couldn’t afford. To them, it’s simply business.”

Mitoma’s book is a collection of 55 essays and a two-hour DVD that keys dances to the text. It has a wide-ranging series of performance excerpts, starting with the Denishawn company in D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic “Intolerance” and ending with a 2001 video segment of postmodern innovator Anna Halprin’s “Returning Home.” There is no other collection like it.

Licensing costs also limited what music Indiana University Press could include in Wayne Enstice and Janis Stockhouse’s groundbreaking “Jazzwomen: Conversations With Twenty-One Musicians,” hailed as “a fascinating and important document” by the Montreal Gazette.

“One of the reasons we didn’t go after the music of [pianists] Diana Krall or Marian McPartland is that the licensing costs would have been extremely expensive,” says marketing director Bryan Gambrel. “Our budget isn’t as big as in the commercial houses. That’s why we’re looking for public- domain or royalty-free music. Fortunately, a lot of the artists in the book are very well known, and their music is easy to get on CD. But others are more difficult to get hold of. We wanted to include tracks and samples from those and some lesser-known musicians.”

The logistics proved easier in the case of another IUP publication, cellist Janos Starker’s autobiography, “The World of Music According to Starker.” “He owned the rights to the music we put in,” Gambrel says.

Amadeus, for its part, has worked out special licensing agreements with Sony BMG. “They consider us a special market,” Cerullo says. “They see this as an opportunity to broadcast their great catalog and to encourage people to buy more of their CDs.”

Next challenge: distribution

Even after rights are secured, publishers can face another problem: distribution.

“That’s one of our biggest challenges,” says UCLA’s Mitoma. “The publishing field has systems in place, whereas video, it’s so locked up in the commercial field, there’s no way you can get in there. I wish it weren’t so.

“By combining a book and a DVD, it’s my hope we can capitalize on the distribution system that’s available for print.”

Cerullo’s answer is to market through major bookstores and chains. “We’ve started with the book buyers for places like Barnes & Noble, Borders and Amazon,” he says. “They love it. That’s where we need to see the books.”

In all these cases, the relationship between text and CD or DVD is direct and obvious. But the team that produced “Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia” took the idea in a new direction, throwing many people’s expectations for a loop.

Instead of smooth musical performances to supplement the text by Charles and Angeliki Vellou Keil and the photos by Dick Blau, readers are treated to something quite different. Steven Feld, who created the audio tracks, calls his contribution “soundscapes.”

“This is not meant to be a studio recording that makes the musicians sound clear and polished,” he explains. “This is a recording that tries to capture the rough edge and gritty authenticity of the street, of the market, a party or the sound from the back of a car.

“I’m an anthropologist and a musician. I make recordings that try to get people to pay attention to the idea that human communities are about sound. They’re about voices and the ambient sounds that constitute what people hear every day. Those sounds are as deeply important as the music is.”

“Quite a few reviewers were puzzled, resentful and felt cheated with the soundscapes,” says Charles Keil. “It’s too verite, too real, too much context, not enough of us.

“But Steve is emphasizing the ‘inclusion’ principle. You may be getting something you don’t want this minute, but who knows what detail will be most important in 50 or 100 years? It’s a mystery what’s going to be relevant to future generations.”

Photographer Blau ventures another idea. “You wouldn’t think twice if this were a serious documentary film,” he says. “That would be the sound of it.

“Steve’s soundscapes are fantastic. They provide a thick and complex atmosphere in which the rest of the book can sit because that’s the sound on the ground. The other stuff is like bugs in amber.”

A book that aspires to the condition of a documentary film. Now, there’s a new idea.

Still, for all the innovations, those involved with this accelerating trend know they’re walking on a thin economic edge. For one thing, their offerings are mostly moderately priced, less than you might expect if you calculated what buying a book and a CD separately would cost.

“We’re pioneers at this point,” says Cerullo. “If we do not sell a lot of copies, our model will not work. It doesn’t have to be 10,000 copies. If I see 3,000 to 5,000 of each book, I’m doing fine.

“But I do hope to see 10,000 -- and make them stay in the catalog for a long time. That’s important. We will know pretty quickly.”