Torrence & Yaeger established new audiences for the organ primarily through their management of the most famous American organist in history - Virgil Fox, thereby raising his fee from $350 to $8,500 per concert, and created the advertising and marketing forces behind the annual revenue rise of the Rodgers Organ Company from $1-million to $7-million in ten years.
As part of their work, Torrence & Yaeger created "Heavy Organ" (Virgil Fox playing all-Bach concerts with the Joshua Light Show at the Fillmore East) as well as the first (electronic) touring organ program, which provided countless new venues for scores of artists playing thousands of concerts over the next four decades. They also successfully solicited Leopold Stokowski's recommendation to install a Rodgers organ in Carnegie Hall - which remained until the renovation of the hall 15 years later. They introduced (and marketed) Fratelli Ruffatti, Pipe Organ Builders of Padua, Italy in the United States; and finally, they "wrote the book" [Virgil Fox (The Dish)] about their joint exploits. Written in the 1980s, the book is now available in its second edition, fourth printing. (Other artists whom Torrence & Yaeger managed included Eartha Kitt, Earl Wild, and Paul Winter.)
Torrence & Yaeger created the most prestigious award in classical music: The Albert Schweitzer Music Award (which was cited in The New York Times's 2006 obituaries of both of the only two female recipients of the award, Katherine Dunham and Anna Moffo).
Responding to a request by Albert Schweitzer's only child, Rhena Schweitzer Miller, to create a Carnegie Hall event honoring her Nobel Prize-winning father on his 100th birthday, Yaeger suggested creating an award "for a life's work dedicated to music and devoted to humanity." (Schweitzer was both a medical doctor and a famous organist and Bach scholar.) The award has so far honored Isaac Stern, Katherine Dunham, Van Cliburn, Mstislav Rostropovich, Leonard Bernstein, John Denver, Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, and Anna Moffo. The Albert Schweitzer Music Award was the beginning of Torrence & Yaeger's non-profit "Creo Society," which was credited by several magazines (such as Avenue, Horizon, and a seven-page featured article in New York Magazine) for having produced and defined some of the most glamorous fundraising events of the 1980s. Another award Torrence & Yaeger created was The Frank Lloyd Wright Creativity Award, most notably presented to Buckminster Fuller at Taliesin West.
Torrence helped save the interior of Town Hall from being converted into two separate theatres by raising a $1-million pledge from financer Ronald English, and orchestrating the appearance, before the New York City Landmarks Commission, of Julius Bloom, Executive Director of Carnegie Hall.
For the first time in the City of New York, the Landmarks Commission voted that the "use" of the interior of a building was as historically important as the building's architectural or interior appearance. The Board therefore voted in Torrence & Bloom's favor; and Town Hall has remained a single venue for concerts and lectures ever since. A new board took over and decided not to accept Mr. English's participation.
Yaeger became the first human being on record to see what happens when a kaleidoscopic image is projected or viewed through a second kaleidoscopic lens and mirror system.
Awarded both U.S. and English patents (in 1978 and 1981, respectively) on his projection device (which has been used, among other places, at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, and at The Bottom Line, Trinity Church Wall Street, and the Whitney Museum in New York), he went on to invent several computerized applications that combine up to four generations of kaleidoscopic mutations. Torrence & Yaeger have so far produced six DVDs since 2003, incorporating more than 60 of Yaeger's "fractal art" compositions. Yaeger's "Kaleidoplex" also appears frequently around the world on television's "Classic Arts Showcase."
Torrence & Yaeger's invitation to the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. to attend the Albert Schweitzer Music Award at Carnegie Hall for Van Cliburn in 1979 was decisive in giving the Soviet Union the opportunity it needed to resume its cultural exchange program with the United States, which had been suspended after Russia's invasion of Afghanistan.
Russia's last-minute scheduling of a Carnegie Hall performance by Emil Gilels immediately before the Cliburn event delivered the USSR's clear message of rapprochement. Furthermore, when Walter Anderson, Head of the Music Division of the National Endowment for Arts, and a member of Torrence & Yaeger's charitable foundation board that chose Cliburn to receive the award, invited the Russians to speak at the Cliburn event, the toast that the Russian Cultural Attache; from the Washington Embassy gave at the dinner ended with, "Let the cannons be silent so that the music can be heard!"
Torrence & Yaeger shortened the development time for protease inhibitors by many years by raising the crucial funding needed to transform AIDS from an automatic death sentence into a long-term chronic illness.
On December 7, 1995, the FDA announced marketing approval for the first in a new class of drugs designed to inhibit HIV and known as protease inhibitors. Exactly nine years earlier - to the day - on December 7, 1986, the money needed to fund the initial study by Dr. Nancy Chang that directed attention to the HIV protease as a target for new drugs was raised at an after-concert event initiated by Torrence & Yaeger at Andy Warhol's art academy next door to the Public Theatre. According to AmFAR executives Terry Beirn and Paul Corser, AmFAR had run out of money for the year and was desperate to meet its final grants obligations for 1986. When Beirn asked Leonard Bernstein to organize and host a fundraising concert, Bernstein - who had already accepted, but not yet received, Torrence & Yaeger's Albert Schweitzer Music Award - insisted that AmFAR could not possibly sell enough concert tickets even to pay for the invitations without hiring professionals, like Torrence & Yaeger, to fundraise. (For example, AmFAR had planned to host a small post-concert dinner party at a Japanese restaurant across the street from the Public Theatre until Yaeger pointed out that under no circumstances could it host a fundraising event in a Japanese venue on Pearl Harbor Day.) The event, which was the first indoor New York "social" event to raise money for AIDS, brought in about $350,000, thanks mainly to such event chairman - recruited by Torrence & Yaeger - as Anne Bass, Carol Petrie, and Judy Peabody. $50,000 of the proceeds went to Dr. Chang, to be used mainly to raise the money she needed for clinical trial research funds from the three pharmaceutical companies that now share the patent. Andy Warhol, who attended, described the event at length in The Andy Warhol Diaries, pages 780-1. Meanwhile, protease inhibitors - which Beirn and Corser claimed were AmFAR's greatest achievement, and which might have taken decades longer to develop without the required seed funds - are now the most important ingredient in the "cocktail" that has been extending, for many years, the lives of countless people carrying HIV - unfortunately, not those of Beirn and Corser, who both died of AIDS.
Torrence & Yaeger contributed the decisive rallying point around which the United Nations and the Reagan family could - for the first time - focus public attention on the burgeoning problem of AIDS.
In a conversation at a special event at Harry Winston in 1987 honoring Torrence & Yaeger's charitable work, the United Nations Chief of Protocol (Aly Teymour) asked Yaeger's advice on how the United Nations might begin to address the AIDS crisis, which, to that point, it had purposefully ignored. Yaeger suggested that the United Nations hold a fundraising event that could benefit both UNICEF and the "Fund for Children with AIDS," which Torrence & Yaeger had created. The resulting event (the Twentieth Anniversary of "Hair" at the United Nations, which Torrence & Yaeger produced, and whose honorary chairmen included the King of Spain and the Secretary General) raised almost a million dollars, most of which was used exclusively for charitable purposes. The production became the first and only time the United Nations has ever hosted a fundraising event in the General Assembly Hall. One of the publicity photos (of Nancy Reagan posing with a child with AIDS) was the first time that either the President or Mrs. Reagan publicly acknowledged the fact that AIDS existed.
Torrence & Yaeger contributed the concept behind the first public fund-raising event at The Rockefeller University (which Yaeger named "The Rockefeller University Founders Ball").
The University's first public fundraising event, which honored David Rockefeller and Brook Astor, raised $350,000, and introduced Steven Rockefeller, Jr. (who became a member of Torrence & Yaeger's foundation board) and his wife Kimberly to New York Society. Other events Torrence & Yaeger created included: "A Million Dollar Cabaret," in which Joan Kroc presented a check for $1-million to Elizabeth Taylor (who was never told that she had "signed" a Western Union telegram that Yaeger wrote to Mrs. Kroc requesting the money); and "The Bach-Gesellschaft of New York," a series of 26 house concerts sponsored by Chase Manhattan Bank of the complete house music by J.S. Bach, at the request of William F. Buckley, Jr., who became another member of Torrence & Yaeger's foundation board.
Torrence & Yaeger raised a $150,000 guarantee from Chase Manhattan Bank so that the first AIDS benefit staged by the dance community ("Dancing for Life") could go on.
Thirteen dance companies performed at Lincoln Center to raise an additional million dollars for AIDS. Without the initial guarantee, however, that was offered by Chase Manhattan (which was already supporting Torrence & Yaeger's Bach-Gesellschaft of New York for the same amount), the original sponsors would have been forced to cancel the initial advertising for the event.
Torrence & Yaeger were decisive in attracting the Wrigley Company to St. Petersburg to build a $75-million factory originally intended for Moscow.
Yaeger's government liaison company's clients during Torrence's 1992-99 stay in Russia (four years as the Official American Advisor to Anatoly Sobchak, Mayor of St. Petersburg) included the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, Arthur Anderson, ICN Pharmaceuticals, and CARESBAC. Once, in First Deputy Mayor Vladimir Putin's office, Torrence and Alex Scherbakov (Torrence & Yaeger's Russian assistant) stood by while Mr. Putin researched the law on his computer until he found the perfect answer to channel $1.5-million from CARESBAC for a dental clinic in St. Petersburg, the money for which would otherwise have never left Moscow.
At the request of Mayor Sobchak, Torrence & Yaeger produced the first two American Film Festivals in St. Petersburg.
Ted Turner (who came to St. Petersburg with Jane Fonda) attended the first festival, to which he gave his film library's permission to be shown in Russia for the first time. For the second film festival, which featured Orion Films, Torrence arranged an event aboard John Kluge's yacht to thank Kluge, who owned Orion at the time, for letting the city keep $750,000 earned from the television sales of Orion's films. Since the Mayor could not attend, Vladimir Putin took his place.
Torrence arranged a meeting between Mayor Sobchak and Milan Panic, owner of ICN Pharmaceuticals, without which Panic threatened to pull his pending $45-million purchase of the Soviet Union's Oktyabrsky Pharmaceutical factory out of the city.
Torrence & Yaeger also helped their liaison client, Arthur Anderson, initiate a $26-million catalog of city properties for St. Petersburg. Altogether, Torrence & Yaeger raised $150-million to benefit St. Petersburg between 1992 and 1996, the year of a mayoral election in which Mayor Sobchak was not reelected, and Mr. Putin went to Moscow to work for Boris Yeltsin. When Mr. Sobchak's rival, who won the election, threatened to put Mr. Sobchak in jail for life, the hospital cardiology clinic for which Torrence & Yaeger was raising money at the time hid Mr. Sobchak - who feigned a heart attack - until Mr. Putin could arrange to fly him to Paris on a private plane, thereby saving his life. Mr. Sobchak remained outside of Russia until returning home to campaign for Mr. Putin's presidency. At the time, Mr. Sobchak was the chairman of Torrence & Yaeger's Anchor-International Foundation. He died during the campaign from heart disease.
Yaeger created "The Cloverleaf Plan," which has been recommended by two members of the New York City Planning Commission to George Soros and his Open Society Institute as a promising, viable means for societies to eliminate poverty throughout the world.
The plan forms the basis of a new project, developed beginning in 2005, and supported by the Open Society Institute and James D. Wolfensohn, to find a suitable Palestinian organization through which the OSI (assisted by several members of the British Royal Family) can help introduce the Cloverleaf Plan to benefit impoverished Palestinian refugee families in Gaza. The New York head of the United Nations Relief Works Agency has reviewed the plan and suggested the support of its US charitable organization, Friends of UNRWA, which is prepared to begin working on its support and implementation.
Yaeger was the first person to publish a health regimen to be tested decisively and recognized as the most powerful anti-aging program available.
Yaeger invented the first and only clinically tested diet and exercise program proven to prevent or delay (up to six years) the onset of Alzheimer's Disease, as confirmed by Dr. Wm. R. Shankle, author of Preventing Alzheimer's. (Dr. Shankle, who was the first neuroscientist to confirm decisively the existence of human neurogenesis, is currently the president of Torrence & Yaeger's Anchor-International Foundation.) With his book, Acting Well, Yaeger became the first writer to connect the acting techniques of Konstantin Stanislavski with health, as confirmed by The Times (of London) in a featured interview with Roy Scheider. Just as Stanislavski created a system for actors that has no rivals, so Acting Well provokes higher consciousness (the force that Yaeger calls "radial power") to create a "thin person" to a degree that no other practice (such as "diet & exercise," meditation, support groups, "lifestyle changes," or "willpower") has ever come close to achieving. Nevertheless, despite Yaeger's month-long, daily fax correspondence with Marlon Brando, urging him to support Yaeger & Scheider's plans to teach Yaeger's weight loss training system to potential coaches from the Stella Adler Studio of Acting (for which Torrence & Yaeger raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2003 on Scheider's behalf), Brando died heavy, at the age of 80, still convinced that, "If I want to lose weight, I know how to lose weight!"
Beginning in 2004, Torrence & Yaeger became the international representatives of Marshall & Ogletree Virtual Pipe Organs.
After-tax profits earned from Torrence & Yaeger's representation will benefit Anchor-International Foundation, Inc. for funding such projects as the Virgil Fox Legacy celebratory concert festivals in Atlanta and New York.
