Ever since Thomas Edison's invention of the gramophone in 1877, recording and playback technologies have had an important and complicated relationship with music. Today these devices abound in every area of musical life, from composition and performance to listening and education. It is therefore surprising that it has taken so long for a scholarly community to coalesce around issues in recorded music, with a solid body of work on the topic only beginning to form a full century after the development of this breakthrough machinery.Footnote ¹ Much of the discussion so far has focused on the history of music and technology, with monographs (in both the academic and the popular press) relating accounts of their mutual influence on each other.Footnote ² Scholars and enthusiasts have also begun to explore a range of social and aesthetic issues in recorded music, whether in stand-alone volumes or in the pages of budding specialist periodicals such as the Journal on the Art of Record Production.Footnote ³ Despite this burgeoning interest in the study of recorded music, the field remains largely disparate, owing in part to its multidisciplinary roots, with researchers coming from backgrounds as varied as musicology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, the history of technology, and professional practice. Newcomers may therefore have difficulty knowing where to start, with a wide array of research available but, until now, no resources for acquainting themselves with the parameters and central issues of the field.

Two new publications from Cambridge University Press are well positioned to fulfil this need. Both are edited volumes bringing together scholars and practitioners from across a broad spectrum of musical and disciplinary backgrounds to reflect on critical issues in the study of recorded music. Although this might at first seem like a puzzling overlap of material for the same publisher, a closer look reveals that the books are targeted towards the needs and interests of two different audiences. The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and John Rink, sees itself as an overview of the ways in which recording ‘has reflected and shaped not just the music itself, but the ways in which it is produced and the ways in which it is heard’ (1). Rich with background information about recording and recordings, it aims to appeal ‘not only to students in a range of subjects from music to the media, but also to general readers with an interest in recorded music’ (front matter). Meanwhile, Recorded Music: Performance, Culture, and Technology, edited by Amanda Bayley, tackles ‘the ways in which records influence the study of music performance and the nature of musical experience’ (front matter). Speaking largely to academic audiences with a research interest in recordings, it promotes the interdisciplinary sharing of approaches and ‘attempts to redress the balance between theory and practice, methodology and application, and technological means and knowledge’ (1). Taken together, these volumes suggest that the study of recorded music has now earned the status of an established area of research, creating a demand for resources among readers at all levels of engagement with the field.

The Cambridge Companion is one of the outputs of the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), of which the book's four editors also served as directors. The aim of CHARM, a research centre funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from 2004 to 2009, was ‘to promote the musicological study of recordings, drawing on a wide range of approaches ranging from computational analysis to business history’.Footnote ⁴ This work was pursued both for its inherent interest and in the service of ‘promot[ing] the study of music as performance through a focus on recordings’.Footnote ⁵ (This larger project of studying music as performance continues under the auspices of CHARM's successor, the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice.) Accordingly, many of the eleven main essays in this volume focus on the production and reception of musical performances as mediated by recording. On the production side this includes essays on the work of producers (Andrew Blake's ‘Recording Practices and the Role of the Producer’), engineers (Albin Zak's ‘Getting Sounds: the Art of Sound Engineering’), and performers (Donald Greig's ‘Performing for (and against) the Microphone’), and the interactions among these parties in the recording studio (Louise Meintjes’ ‘The Politics of the Recording Studio: a Case Study from South Africa’). On the reception side we find discussions of how recordings can affect the interactions with music of contemporary listeners (Arild Bergh and Tia DeNora's ‘From Wind-Up to iPod: Techno-Cultures of Listening’), critics (Simon Frith's ‘Going Critical: Writing about Recordings’), and scholars (Cook's ‘Methods for Analysing Recordings’).

The book contains a mix of historically and topically oriented essays, with broad overviews of developments in technology (George Brock-Nannestad's ‘The Development of Recording Technologies’) and the recording industry (David Patmore's ‘Selling Sounds: Recordings and the Record Business’) that provide readers with useful context for the critical discussions in the chapters mentioned above. The authors make few assumptions about their readers’ intellectual backgrounds, and for the most part the essays are firmly grounded in concrete musical practices, scenarios, and examples. All this is to say that readers need not necessarily have read Adorno or Benjamin before picking up the book but should have a good knowledge of music on record – or, at least, access to some of the recordings discussed, which range in style from classical and popular to jazz and world music.

One interesting feature of the Cambridge Companion that helps boost its appeal to the music-loving general reader is its inclusion of brief ‘personal takes’ as a counterpoint to its eleven main chapters. The eighteen voices represented here mostly adopt ‘a practitioner's viewpoint, the practices in question including performance, record production, sound engineering, and record collecting’ (2). Readers may recognize such names as Nick Mason, drummer from Pink Floyd; Susan Tomes, pianist of the Florestan Trio; and Martyn Ware, founding member of the Human League and Heaven 17. Frequently drawing on the authors’ own professional experiences, these essays offer personal perspectives on many of the same topics as those covered in the longer texts – sometimes complementing but just as often contradicting the scholarly perspective. The most effective are those that expand on an idea introduced in the preceding main chapter, giving the reader an insider's perspective on the artistic, technical, and decision-making processes in record production. For example, after Simon Trezise's article ‘The Recorded Document: Interpretation and Discography’ – which examines the ways in which historic recordings may be ‘unreliable narrators’ of the music contained therein (e.g. as a result of limitations in the frequency and dynamic response of the recording device) – Ted Kendall, who has devoted much of his career to remastering such recordings, discusses some of these distortions in greater detail and explains how mastering engineers use the latest technology ‘to make these performances accessible to a modern audience, in terms of […] the most informative sonic presentation possible’ (210). Together the ‘personal takes’ serve as a reminder of how much researchers stand to learn from talking to practitioners, whether in the study of recorded music or in any other field that has the benefit of living, breathing primary sources.

Although the Cambridge Companion aims to explore issues in music and recording, it occasionally strays from this course, turning to broader questions of performance that simply happen to be captured in recorded form – a symptom of the editors’ larger interest in the study of music as performance. This is most evident in Leech-Wilkinson's ‘Recordings and Histories of Performance Style’, which invokes theories of cultural evolution and the biological notion of runaway selection to examine style change in the performance of classical music since the advent of recording. Leech-Wilkinson acknowledges that ‘performance style has changed more rapidly since recordings became commonly listened to by musicians’ (259), but recordings actually play very little part in his discussion except as a transparent medium for performances. Indeed, despite his impressive knowledge of historic performances on record and his elegant analysis of how performers respond to external influences in developing their own personal style, this chapter cannot help but feel out of place in a volume that purports to look at recordings for what they are instead of just what they contain. At its best, however, Leech-Wilkinson's study serves as an example of how recordings can be used to study types of musical detail not accessible through other modes of transmission, such as notation, and might have been better framed as such.

Overall, the Cambridge Companion is broad in scope, diverse in viewpoints, and accessible in tone, making it a lively and engaging primer on recorded music. This collection offers a rich overview of historical, sociocultural, aesthetic, and technological issues in recorded music, while providing a taste of current research in the field and hinting at fresh insights that we can expect to see fleshed out more fully in future research from its contributors. The book is well suited for an undergraduate course on recording studies or on music and technology, and individual chapters might also be of use in other areas of study: in a course on popular music, Zak's discussion of the increasing integration of aesthetic and technical decisions in the studio and the consequent blurring of the roles of producer and engineer; in a course on empirical musicology, Cook's exploration of various computationally based approaches to music analysis and their use in understanding music as cultural practice; in a course on music industry business and economics, Patmore's study of how record companies have adapted their commercial strategies in response to changing technologies of recording, playback, and distribution. The Cambridge Companion also has much to offer to the broader musicological community, promoting new ways of understanding music beyond the text, whether as recordings or as performances on record.

Readers seeking more theoretically ambitious approaches to the study of recordings might prefer Bayley's Recorded Music, a collection of essays written by researchers for researchers. The essays in this volume explore a wide range of musical styles and genres, presenting ‘discourses in jazz, ethnomusicology, and popular music – whose histories and practices have evolved principally from recordings – […] alongside those of Western classical music, where analysis of recordings is a relatively recent development’ (front matter). While Bayley acknowledges that each field has developed its own methods of analysis in order to address its particular disciplinary and musical concerns, her book brings together researchers of all stripes in the hope of promoting the cross-fertilization of approaches to the study of recordings:

As such, the volume is organized into four broad thematic sections, each with a variety of musics represented within it: ‘Recordings and Their Contexts’, ‘The Recording Process’, ‘Recordings as Texts’, and ‘Sonic Creations and Re-creations’.

Part I, ‘Recordings and Their Contexts’, examines the status of recordings from a number of perspectives: disciplinary, aesthetic, ethical, stylistic. Stephen Cottrell's ‘The Rise and Rise of Phonomusicology’ critiques the traditional, often stylistically driven disciplinary boundaries within musicology by demonstrating the linkages among seemingly disparate approaches to the study of recordings. Cottrell sees in these linkages a potential new ‘anti-discipline’ of phonomusicology, an approach ‘delimited not by style, canon, or geographic context’ but focused on the interactions of recording technology, musical performance, and creativity (32). Turning to the cultural situation of classical recording today, Peter Johnson's ‘Illusion and Aura in Classical Audio Recording’ draws on Benjamin's concept of ‘aura’ to describe an ‘aesthetics of illusion’ (36) that is ‘closely in tune with the aesthetic of autonomy that has characterized much production and theorizing of Western art music over the last century’ (48). Meanwhile, Andrew Blake's ‘Ethical and Cultural Issues in the Digital Era’ explores how new recording and distribution technologies have prompted the breakdown of traditional musical values – specifically ‘the hierarchical power relations of composer–performer–critic–listener’ – so that the recorded product, rather than being ‘a thing-in-itself’, is ‘always-already part of a process of transformation’ (64). Adam Krims's ‘The Changing Functions of Music Recordings and Listening Practices’ follows in this vein by investigating how consumers often ‘inflect the meanings of music recordings […] in order to challenge the dominant values that they represent’ (81). He concludes that recording is not ‘a one-way imposition of communication’ but part of ‘an extraordinarily versatile and creative feedback system’ (82).

Part II, ‘The Recording Process’, considers both the creative process of recording and recording itself as part of the creative process. James Barrett's ‘Producing Performance’ highlights the roles of producer and engineer, showing how they contribute to the dynamic interplay of artistic creation, technical resource, and social imperative in the recording process. John Baily's ‘Modi Operandi in the Making of “World Music” Recordings’ also examines the impact of the recordist on the recording, pitting the ‘documentary’ approach of ethnomusicologists against the commercially driven approach of the record industry, which he sees as willing to exploit studio resources in any way necessary to create a marketable product. Meanwhile, Patmore's ‘Recording and the Rattle Phenomenon’ presents a picture of a conductor who understands the recorded product as being secondary to the recording process. Drawing on interviews with Simon Rattle and his collaborators, Patmore describes Rattle's view of recording as a process of developing a piece with the orchestra rather than the creation of a finished artefact. Indeed, as Peter Elsdon illustrates in ‘Jazz Recordings and the Capturing of Performance’, recordings can function as the beginning of the creative process rather than the endpoint. Arguing that the very act of recording serves culturally to construct a piece as a composition, Elsdon analyses the changes between successive live recordings of John Coltrane's ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ to show how recording ‘intrudes right into the development of the very musical traditions to which it provides access’ (157).

Part III, ‘Recordings as Texts’, explores recordings as transmitters of musical and cultural content. Catherine Tackley's ‘Jazz Recordings as Social Texts’ grapples with ‘the ability of recording to transcend and blur past, present, and future and to be heard anew in multiple historical and geographical contexts’ (170). Focusing on audience reception, she proposes a tripartite framework for evaluating a record's significance: within retrospective discourse, in its historical context, and in its present context. Jonathan Stock and Amanda Bayley then consider recordings as documentary tools in ‘Recordings as Research Tools in Ethnomusicology’ and ‘Multiple Takes: Using Recordings to Document the Creative Process’. Stock's essay, ‘aimed at researchers outside ethnomusicology who are devising their own recording-related study projects’ (187), outlines some basic uses of recordings in scholarly work, while Bayley uses recordings to document the creative process of bringing a work from page to stage in the contemporary classical world. Finally, we turn to popular music in Serge Lacasse's ‘The Phonographic Voice: Paralinguistic Features and Phonographic Staging in Popular Music Singing’ and Allan Moore's ‘The Track’. Lacasse explores some expressive qualities of the recorded voice using aural interpretation and spectrum analysis, whereas Moore looks more broadly at ‘all matters of timbre, texture, and virtual performance’ in the recorded text (260), showing how producers have exploited the studio as a compositional resource in popular music. As a result, he argues, the ‘track’ has replaced the ‘song’ as the primary text in popular music.

Part IV, ‘Sonic Creations and Re-creations’, explores how technologies of recording have changed our notions of creativity. John Dack's ‘From Sound to Music, from Recording to Theory’ advocates Pierre Schaeffer's technique of écoute réduite – which rejects source identification in favour of hearing a sound ‘for its inherent qualities’ (276) – as a way of facilitating new musical metaphors that reflect the shift from the physical studio to the virtual, digital environment. Virgil Moorefield's ‘Modes of Appropriation: Covers, Remixes, and Mash-Ups in Contemporary Popular Music’ also considers the relationship between sound and context, describing how ‘the wide availability of increasingly advanced recording technology’ has paved the way for new methods of musical transformation and recombination – and, in turn, new definitions of musicianship that have less to do with scales and harmony than with pitch-shifting and tempo-matching (304). Further investigating the concept of musicianship, Zak's ‘Painting the Sonic Canvas: Electronic Mediation as Musical Style’ argues that the fusion of the musical idea with its utterance in recording ‘changes the calculus of a work's identity and creative process as it renders all aspects of musical production equally enduring’ (307), thereby problematizing the traditional division between composition and performance.

Regardless of their disciplinary orientation or area of study, musicologists who engage with music on record (which is to say, most of them) will find this volume useful in developing a greater awareness of their approach to recordings in their research. Recorded Music also offers penetrating insights into the various functions of recordings as tools, texts, or processes, with case studies drawn from a wide variety of musics. Notably, regardless of the particular set of performers or musical styles that serves as the starting point for the study, each author takes care to draw out critical strands that relate to sociocultural or aesthetic issues in recorded music more broadly, making this volume a success in its goal of promoting methodological approaches across disciplinary and stylistic boundaries.

Despite the wide array of issues covered in these two volumes, the Cambridge Companion and Recorded Music still leave plenty of ground uncovered. There is, for example, very little discussion of the complex ethical and legal considerations surrounding recordings. Tomes and Greig briefly allude to the use of editing and signal processing effects in classical recording as ‘cheating’ but don't explore the idea more fully. Likewise, Barrett and Baily share a concern for issues of ownership and copyright in ethnographic recordings, but neither is willing to open this can of worms in his essay. In addition, both volumes mention the democratizing effects of recording technology, but their contributors still stick largely to examining work by professional musicians. Moorefield opens up the field to bedroom producers with his exposition of mash-ups, but other amateur music communities, such as hip-hop DJs, are virtually ignored in these volumes. Moreover, Stock talks about the use of recordings to help ethnomusicologists develop their performance skills in the musical traditions they study, but no writer makes any mention of recordings as pedagogical tools for music students more broadly. Finally, radio, television, and film are ‘significantly under-represented’, as Bayley herself acknowledges of Recorded Music (2). Of course, no book could possibly hope to cover every topic in a field where technologies and practices are ever-changing. Nonetheless, these volumes productively bring together a variety of discourses on recorded music and suggest that, as recorded music itself continues to thrive and evolve, so too will the field grow and flourish in new directions.