It's been quite a wonderful year of music for which we, the staff at Nonesuch Records, are grateful as ever. We are thankful both to the artists whom we are privileged to have call Nonesuch their musical home and to the music lovers around the world who support those artists and the music they make. Stay tuned for a re-cap of all the great music we enjoyed this year to come in the Nonesuch Journal. In the meantime, we wanted to wish everyone happy holidays with the short video message here.

On January 12, 2010, an earthquake struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti 10 miles west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, damaging nearly 190,000 houses and displacing some 500,000 people. In November 2011, Nonesuch Records staffer Stephanie Bauman joined four fellow Warner Music Group employees for the 28th annual Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Habitat for Humanity work project in Léogâne, Haiti. She and the WMG team joined President Carter and 400 other volunteers from all over the US in helping to rebuild. Read about Stephanie's unforgettable experience here and see photos from the project.

New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity dedicated the Musicians’ Village Toddler Park last month in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans. The central walkway, Hurwitz Way, is named in honor of Bob Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch Records. A gallery of photographs from the park's dedication has now been posted to nonesuch.com/media, along with several of Hurwitz's photos of Musicians' Village. In 2005, Nonesuch released the benefit album Our New Orleans, which raised 1.1 million dollars to create new housing for the Musicians' Village.

New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity dedicated the newly finished Musicians’ Village Toddler Park today in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans, made possible through the support of Nonesuch Records / Warner Music Group, New York Life, and The Talbott Foundation. The central walkway, Hurwitz Way, is named in honor of Nonesuch president Bob Hurwitz. In 2005, Nonesuch released the benefit album Our New Orleans, which raised 1.1 million dollars, donated to New Orleans Habitat for Humanity to create new housing for the Musicians' Village.

Nonesuch Records recently published the cover of the forthcoming album featuring Steve Reich's WTC 9/11, performed by Kronos Quartet. The cover and our publishing of it have elicited a considerable response both on this website and elsewhere. Nonesuch Records President Robert Hurwitz offers a comment.

Kronos Quartet was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievement and excellence in music, in a ceremony held last night at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. As the recipient of this honor, Kronos receives a monetary award of $75,000. At last night’s ceremony, Nonesuch Records President Robert Hurwitz spoke of the label’s relationship with Kronos, now three decades strong, and the group’s unique contributions to the world of music. Read the full text of his speech here.

Nonesuch President Bob Hurwitz is featured on the latest episode of The Monocle Weekly, the audio series on global affairs, business, culture, design, and consumer culture hosted by Monocle magazine Editor-in-Chief Tyler Brûlé. On this week's special hour-long episode from New York, Bob discusses the past, present, and future of the music business.

This fall, Nonesuch marked 25 years under the leadership of Bob Hurwitz. Bob became president of Nonesuch in 1984 and hired Peter Clancy, now the company’s senior vice president for marketing, shortly thereafter. Around the same time, David Bither—now the label’s executive vice president—came on as a dollar-a-year consultant. That this remarkably successful trio has stayed together and continued recording such extraordinary music for two-and-a-half decades is an occasion worth celebrating, and Nonesuch artists, staff, family, and friends did just that this week at two events in New York City.

Jonny Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver will receive its West Coast premiere tonight at San Francisco's Herbst Theatre. The composer included excerpts from the piece in his score for the Oscar-winning film There Will Be Blood, which you can listen to here. Tonight's concert also marks the San Francisco debut of New York's Wordless Music Series (helmed by Nonesuch's own Ronen Givony), which is presenting the concert and which gave the piece's US premiere in New York earlier this year.

All this month, and running through May 12, BBC Radio 2 is airing a six-part documentary called Jac Holzman's Elektra Story, as part of the network's Monday night Music Club. In part three of the documentary, the company founder recounts the Nonesuch Records founder's earliest days and his hopes for the new endeavor. Joshua Rifkin was involved from the start and sums up the label's initial appeal this way: "Inexpensive classical record labels had been there before, but they looked like a budget production. And it was Jac's brilliant idea to think that one could do something that really looked distinctive, did not look low-rent, had a definite identity of its own."

Last Wednesday, Nonesuch Records' production coordinator, Ronen Givony, was listening to an eclectic set of music—piano pieces by Haydn and Messiaen, some electronic tunes, new music for laptop and strings. Not an unlikely mix off the iPod shuffle here at the office. But for this particular listening, Ronen was at a concert at the Good-Shepherd Faith Church on Manhattan's Upper West Side for the much rarer thrill of attending a concert he had produced himself. It was the latest event in the successful series he created last year called Wordless Music.

Nonesuch President Bob Hurwitz responds to Senior Vice President David Bither's previous entry on being a Cubs fan.