[5] Among the most notable achievements of Sterne's time at the label were the release of George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children, inspired by the poems of Federico García Lorca, which sold more than 70,000 units;[6] the recording of new works by Elliott Carter, including his first and second string quartets; and the commissioning and release of Charles Wuorinen's Time's Encomium, which became the first electronic work to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1970.

[7] Under Sterne, Nonesuch helped spark a ragtime revival in the United States with the release of a series of Scott Joplin piano rags performed by Joshua Rifkin.

[12] He built upon the world music reputation of Nonesuch, represented up to that point by the Explorer Series, with his signing of Brazilian singer and composer Caetano Veloso, who, like Reich and Adams, has maintained an ongoing relationship with the label for decades.

[14] Among Nonesuch world-music successes during the 1980s was the release of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, a recording of the Bulgarian State Television female choir, and the American debut of the Gipsy Kings, which was certified platinum with over one million in sales.

Though she had long been a highly regarded interpreter of other writers’ songs, her Nonesuch debut was distinguished by being her first album to primarily feature self-penned compositions.

Laurie Anderson has put out three discs with the label, and Nonesuch reissued her seminal Big Science album, an avant-garde project that became an unlikely pop hit in 1982.

Among more recent Nonesuch signings, the most commercially successful has been The Black Keys, the former Akron, Ohio-based duo who parlayed cult status as no-frills blues rockers into an arena-sized following and received multiple Grammy Awards for their 2010 album Brothers and their 2012 release El Camino.

[17] Forward-thinking traditional groups Carolina Chocolate Drops and Punch Brothers also joined the label, as well as iconoclastic folk interpreter Sam Amidon.

The Chocolate Drops, a group exploring the African-American roots of old-time music, won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album for its Nonesuch debut, Genuine Negro Jig.

Mandolinist and composer Chris Thile of Punch Brothers was named a 2012 MacArthur Fellow, receiving one of 23 “genius” grant awards to extraordinary practitioners in a variety of creative fields.

As a solo artist, he has also joined the classical ranks of the label, releasing the first of three discs of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas, written for the violin but transposed by Thile for mandolin.

[22] As with its catalog of Broadway cast recordings, Nonesuch has assembled an equally selective roster of movie soundtracks, chief among them the scores of Philip Glass.

[24][25] Nonesuch has also recorded the film work of Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, including writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-nominated There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012).

The series, which Nonesuch released from 1967[33] to 1984, consisted of field recordings made primarily in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Eastern Europe.