Maple Grove Music Productions was the brainchild of Alan Fraser and his former student, Jovan Haji-Djurich. Both were musicians with no previous business experience, but it seems their genetic makeup is not entirely lacking in business acumen. Alan’s paternal great-grandfather ran a successful lumber and ship building enterprise in Nova Scotia 100 years ago. He was one of the most prosperous businessmen in Eastern Canada but fell upon hard times when the company went public, building a pulp and paper mill that went bankrupt shortly thereafter due to the stock manipulations of some rather unscrupulous American business partners.
Jovan’s maternal great-grandfather ran a successful import-export business and was one of the richest men in Valyevo, Serbia, until the Communists took over in 1949 and confiscated everything including a mansion in the most exclusive part of Belgrade. It seems that somewhere inside both of them was the impulse perhaps not so much to make up for the earlier fall in their respective family fortunes but to take up the torch of the family’s creative bent, to develop a business that sells a quality product and to empower the many people involved in that process.
The chance for this impulse to find expression arrived in 2006 when Alan produced the DVD version of his book, The Craft of Piano Playing (Scarecrow Press, 2003). A window of opportunity opened, and it was Jovan’s belief not only in the artistic and pedagogical value of the product and its corresponding commercial possibilities, but in the necessity of forming the company, so that a greater number of pianists could be exposed to the same pedagogical regime under which he himself had flourished, that finally ignited and made real the company that had lingered somewhere in Alan’s dreams for so many years.
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