Mitch Miller
Mitchell William Miller (July 4, 1911 – July 31, 2010)[1][2] was an American choral conductor, record producer, record-industry executive, and professional oboist. He was involved in almost all aspects of the industry, particularly as a conductor and artists and repertoire (A&R) man. Miller was one of the most influential people in American popular music during the 1950s and early 1960s, both as the head of A&R at Columbia Records and as a best-selling recording artist with an NBC television series, Sing Along with Mitch. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester in the early 1930s, Miller began his musical career as a player of the oboe and English horn, making numerous highly regarded classical and popular recordings.
For other people with similar names, see Mitchell Miller.
Mitch Miller
Mitchell William Miller
July 4, 1911
Rochester, New York, U.S.
July 31, 2010 (aged 99)
New York City, U.S.
- Musician
- singer
- conductor
- record producer
- record company executive
1928–2005
Early life[edit]
Mitchell William Miller was born to a Jewish family[3] in Rochester, New York, on July 4, 1911. His mother was Hinda (Rosenblum) Miller, a former seamstress, and his father, Abram Calmen Miller, a Russian-Jewish immigrant wrought-iron worker. Mitch had four siblings, two of whom, Leon and Joseph, survived him. He attended East High School.[2]
Career[edit]
Classical and jazz oboe[edit]
Miller took up the oboe at first as a teenager, because it was the only instrument available when he went to audition for his junior high school orchestra.[2] After graduating from East High School he attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, where he met and became a lifelong friend of Goddard Lieberson, who became president of the CBS music group in 1956.[4]
After graduating from Eastman, Miller played with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and then moved to New York City, where he was a member of the Alec Wilder Octet (1938–41 and occasionally later), as well as performing with David Mannes, Andre Kostelanetz, Percy Faith, George Gershwin, and Charlie Parker. He worked with Frank Sinatra on the 1946 recording of Frank Sinatra Conducts the Music of Alec Wilder.[2]
Miller played the English horn part in the Largo movement of Dvořák's New World Symphony in a 1947 recording conducted by Leopold Stokowski.[5] In 1948 he performed Mozart's Oboe Concerto in C major with the CBS Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alfredo Antonini in a broadcast for Voice of America.[6]
Miller gave the American premiere of Richard Strauss's Oboe Concerto in a 1948 radio broadcast. Strauss had originally assigned rights to the premiere to John de Lancie, who gave him the idea for the concerto while stationed near Strauss's villa in Garmisch. However, since meeting the composer, de Lancie had won a section oboist position with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and as a junior player to the orchestra's principal oboist Marcel Tabuteau was unable to fulfill Strauss's wishes. De Lancie then gave the rights for the premiere to Miller.[7]
As part of the CBS Symphony, Miller participated in the musical accompaniment on the 1938 radio broadcast of Orson Welles's Mercury Theater on the Air production of The War of the Worlds. He also performed in Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor.[8]
A&R man[edit]
Miller joined Mercury Records as a classical music producer and served as the head of Artists and Repertoire (A&R) at Mercury in the late 1940s, and then joined Columbia Records in the same capacity in 1950. This was a pivotal position in a recording company, because the A&R executive decided which musicians and songs would be recorded and promoted by that particular record label.
He defined the Columbia style through the early 1960s, signing and producing many important pop standards artists for Columbia, including Johnnie Ray, Percy Faith, Ray Conniff, Jimmy Boyd, Johnny Mathis,[9] Tony Bennett, and Guy Mitchell (whose pseudonym was based on Miller's first name).
After arriving at Columbia, Miller enticed Frankie Laine to join the label after his early successes at Mercury. Miller helped direct the careers of artists who were already signed to the label, such as Doris Day, Dinah Shore, and Jo Stafford. Miller also discovered Aretha Franklin, and signed her to the first major recording contract of her career. She left Columbia after five years, when Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records promised Franklin artistic freedom to create records outside the pop mainstream in a more rhythm-and-blues-driven direction.
Mitch Miller disapproved of rock 'n' roll[9]—one of his contemporaries described his denunciation of it as "The Gettysburg Address of Music"—and passed not only on Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, who became stars on RCA and Coral, respectively, but on The Beatles as well, creating a fortune in revenue for rival Capitol. Previously, Miller had offered Presley a contract but balked at the amount Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was asking.[10] However, in 1958 he signed Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, two of Presley's contemporaries at Sun Records.[10]
According to former Newsweek music critic Karen Schoemer, Miller's refusal to record in the genre was also due to his fear that the label, and its corporate parent CBS, would be implicated in the scandal surrounding payola if he did so, remarking:
Personal life and death[edit]
Miller was married for 65 years to the former Frances Alexander, who died in 2000.[2] They had two daughters, a son, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His son, Mike (Mitchell) Miller Jr., is a respected children's book illustrator who featured in several of Jack Sendak's books.[27][28][29][30][31][32]
Miller lived in New York City for many years, where he died on July 31, 2010, after a short illness, nearly four weeks after his 99th birthday.[2]
