The Musicology of Record Production, the first monograph by Simon Zagorski-Thomas, is a manifesto of sorts, one that builds on a productive decade of activity within the Association on the Art of Record Production. As a manifesto, it invites comparison with other musicological manifestos; for example, Guido Adler's seminal treatise on musikwissenschaft (1981[1885]),Footnote ¹ or Charles Seeger's unitary field theory for musicology (1977[1947]).Footnote ² Adler and Seeger were forward thinking, and attempted to develop flexible schema that were equally applicable to musical analysis as they were to humanistic and social scientific thought.

This book is a different kind of a manifesto, however. It focuses on a new subfield that emerged out of ‘research as practice’ initiatives, which is in large part a product of the growth of degree-granting music technology programmes and the post-1992 restructuring of higher education in the United Kingdom. While some reference is made to recording practices in Africa, Poland, and elsewhere, ultimately this book tends to focus most on the 1950s–1980s ‘golden era’ of anglophone pop/rock/jazz album recording. The limited genre and geographical scope, and the downplaying of sociocultural and political issues, both complicate the book's aim to ‘incorporate record production into the body of musicology’ (26).

At the chapter level, the book is structured around eight concepts or issues: 1) sonic cartoons, 2) staging, 3) the development of audio technology, 4) using technology, 5) training, communication, and practice, 6) performance in the studio, 7) aesthetics and consumer influence, and 8) the business of record production. In sum, these comprise what Zagorski-Thomas terms a systems, or ecological, approach to the study of recorded music. While each of these concepts has been the subject of numerous previous academic studies, this book is unique in part for the distinctive way in which these disparate concepts are brought into dialogue with each other.

One metaphor that figures throughout the book is the sonic cartoon. For Zagorski-Thomas, the capture of sound and reduction of the listener experience to stereophonic audio, accompanied by a litany of techniques used to exaggerate features and re-stage recordings, amounts to the audible equivalent of cartoon sketches. While the metaphor works for explicating certain studio-based processes, it makes less sense for others. A visual cartoon (we could add cubism, abstract expressionism, and pop art to the possible visual art metaphors) begins with a reduction of figuration to the bare outline. If we were to do this musically, it would (perhaps) involve the removal of all inessential frequency information, leaving just a sine wave or, at most, the minimum of harmonic and inharmonic overtones required to recognize the instrument in question. That is clearly not what's happening in the kind of record production being discussed here. Recordings that begin with the real-time capture of sound sources through microphony are perhaps more akin to photography, and certainly the recent growth of high dynamic range (HDR) digital photography suggests image processing workflows that bear much in common with music recording and non-linear digital audio editing. Zagorski-Thomas suggests that the cartoon should be understood more in the sense of Leonardo da Vinci's cartoons, but those were always preparatory sketches for subsequent paintings. The sonic cartoons discussed here are not preparations for later works but rather the finished recorded works themselves.

The chapter on staging, which builds on the work of Serge Lacasse and William Moylan, is one of the high points of the book. Perhaps the primary difference between the experience of listening to sound in the world versus recorded sound playback is the reduction of spatial cues in stereophonic audio recordings. Recorded sound cannot capture the experience of being in a room with an instrument since the tracking microphones are fixed, which does not mirror the experience of hearing a sound live where even small movements of the listener's head result in a different perception of timbre and space. This leads to a considerable effort on the part of recordists to create different kinds of staging, or ‘treatment[s] of sound in ways that add meaningful context for the listener to a performance or a perceived musical “event”’ (78). One kind of staging concerns ‘proxemics’ or the sense of intimacy in recordings, especially prevalent in crooning singing styles but also present in all close-miked recordings. Some kinds of staging concern the creation of imaginary spaces with no real-world equivalent, while others stage the ‘sound of specific media’ (86); for example, the sound of vinyl record pops and crackles. Staging and spatialization are aspects of music that can be fruitfully analysed, and as such the discussion here suggests a distinctive contribution to musical analysis.

An understanding of recorded music requires an understanding of its material affordances, or in other words how technologies were invented and disseminated. In the first half of the twentieth century, most recording technology was developed and used in-house by record companies and radio stations (or developed by various militaries); it wasn't until after the Second World War that there was a significant consumer market for such technology. Instead of surveying this broader history, Chapter Six, on the ‘development of audio technology’, focuses on the oft-cited story of Les Paul and the development of Ampex's multi-track tape recorders, or rather, on the multiple conflicting accounts of how multi-track tape technology and creative approaches to overdubbing developed in tandem. Zagorski-Thomas convincingly uses these stories to articulate the theoretical concepts of affordances and technological frame. However, this chapter provides a somewhat narrow or misleading view of technological development, perpetuating the fallacy that audio technologies have primarily been designed in the United States, UK, and Germany and subsequently exported abroad. Japan is credited as becoming a ‘major player in the last two decades’ (98), but most of the technical capacity for designing and manufacturing digital disc and tape recording technologies, let alone digital synthesis, has since the late 1960s been situated in Japanese corporations such as Denon, Sony, NHK, and JVC. In addition to these countries, companies such as Lyrec and B&K in Denmark and Fairlight in Australia have been important for the invention of specialty technologies, and the book makes no mention of audio technologies developed for specific national markets, including Lomo and RTT in Russia and Sonodyne in India.

Chapter Seven turns to the use of technology and different kinds of technological users, framing these with a systems approach to creativity and the social construction of technology (SCOT). Again, this chapter doesn't provide an overview but rather focuses on two specific categories of technological use: creative abuse (especially of dynamic range compressors such as the Universal Audio 1176) and the visualization of sound. Zagorski-Thomas argues that individuals make choices about technological use both in relation to the programs or scripts designed by the inventors, and in relation to multiple social fields (i.e., other recording professionals, audiences). The multiple modes of sound visualization now available through computer-based recording constitute ‘a very powerful influence on the user’ (135), affecting how users think about music, especially with regards to musical timing.Footnote ³

The introduction of multi-track recording and shift towards recording parts in isolation from each other came to have notable effects on how music is performed in studio environments. Although typically thought of as part of pop/rock recording, tape editing was central to the creation of Miles Davis's album Bitches Brew and numerous other jazz and classical albums. Zagorski-Thomas frames studio-sited performance as a ‘constant negotiation between performance practice and recording practice’ (176), where key issues include performer comfort within the studio environment and the ability of musicians and engineers to clearly hear what they need to hear. Partly due to the technological apparatus of the studio and partly due to the economics of recording, studios can become the site for power struggles over creative control. A desire for increased artistic control has partly been responsible for the growth of the home recording industry, but this can lead to alienated environments where performers are effectively playing by themselves (198–9).

Record production, while a largely isolated practice, doesn't happen in complete isolation from the anticipated audience for the recordings being made, and from the economics of the recording industry. As Zagorski-Thomas notes, ‘the producer and the artist work best when they are as much part of the fan base as the audience, and where they share the same ideological perspectives as their target listeners’ (207). Recording, therefore, always transpires in relation to audience expectations of genre-specific conventions concerning which technologies or technological processes are ‘authentic’ or ‘natural’. Audible aesthetics such as hardcore and high fidelity, too, are indelibly linked to the ‘habitus of audience expectations’ (216). Music businesses also can have a significant influence on the production process, from suggesting repertoire, to developing the fame of iconic performers, to influencing where and how recordings are made. The role of the record producer, and the relation between producers and record labels, have changed significantly over the years, from the talent scout period when they performed the duties of A&R reps, to the period of the staff producer, to the post-1970s era of the freelance entrepreneur.

Most of these concepts (and many others) recur within multiple chapters, leading to a disjunct narrative unfolding at times. To hold things together, Zagorski-Thomas utilizes an assemblage of methods borrowed from cognitive psychology and science and technology studies. In particular, the book is first and foremost structured around a systems approach to creativity (especially the work of Csikszentmihalyi), with numerous allusions to SCOT (the social construction of technology) and ANT (actor-network theory).Footnote ⁴ Of these, the work of Csikszentmihalyi is perhaps the best integrated, and this book does much to move recorded music studies beyond auteur theory and the over-fetishization of the genius of individual producers and towards a much more nuanced understanding of production as a collaborative and embodied practice.

However, I was puzzled by the recurring references to SCOT and ANT, in part since some of the examples attributed to one of these paradigms do not clearly articulate them. For example, the section ‘how tools make us think’ (146–8), which postulates numerous effects that sampling technologies have had on creative practices and technical work, would appear to be articulated as pure technological constructionism and precisely the antithesis of a SCOT-type argument. The concept of technological frame, also taken from SCOT research, similarly appears to be misconstrued; Zagorski-Thomas cites Wiebe Bijker to suggest it refers to ‘the way problems were identified and problem-solving strategies were determined’ (110), which is a far narrower definition than Bijker provides in the cited book. Bijker's project, rather, was to ‘link the thinking and actions of individual actors to the social processes constituting the relevant social groups’,Footnote ⁵ striving to capture the ‘diversity of interactions’ of individuals within these social groups in order to understand how these create or maintain power structures and lead to ‘the attribution of meanings to technical artifacts’.Footnote ⁶ Technological frames do contain questions and problems, but also include current theories and tacit knowledge. And whereas this book considers only the end-users of audio technology (i.e., engineers and producers), technological frames are notable for containing many different kinds of users; for example, designers, product distributors, manufacturers, and other categories of actors.

Regarding actor-network theory, part of the problem may be the lack of engagement with some of its most productive components, specifically agency, delegation, and translation/mediation. There are many analytical frameworks other than ANT that could be leveraged to understand the relation between musicians, producers, and tape recorders; this book mainly recounts straightforward narratives about technology use, rather than the kinds of narratives where ANT becomes most useful. What makes an ANT approach distinctive is an agnosticism towards understanding or theorizing agency, and employment of ethnographic processes to explore how specific sociotechnical assemblages cohere. Delegation refers to the ways in which technologies or social formations are created and leveraged to do work on behalf of an actor. Mediation (in earlier works of Bruno Latour termed translation) explicates forces that come between or bridge distinct domains of practice (e.g., science and public policy) and in doing so come to constitute and defend a new network. An effective actor-network analysis, according to Benjamin Piekut, ‘highlights the controversies, trials, and contingencies of the truth, instead of reporting it as coherent, self-evident, and available for discovery’.Footnote ⁷ Alternatively, a case for ANT can be made when ‘it is just not possible, during the process of what Small (1998) calls “musicking”, to distinguish between discrete logics belonging to the technical, the aesthetic and the sociological’.Footnote ⁸ As Nick Prior has recently warned in relation to the sociology of music, ‘while theoretical eclecticism can be a useful corrective to siding with a single theorist, it can also end up as a marriage of inconsistent premises’.Footnote ⁹

The question then remains to what extent and in what ways the musicology of record production impacts upon the extant field of musicology. Unlike much work in ethnomusicology and in ethnomusicologically influenced historical musicology, the present book downplays or sidesteps issues of power, identity, politics, and culture. If we are to continue the valuable process of reversing musicology's ‘remarkable capacity to imagine music into an object that [has] nothing to do with political and moral crises’Footnote ¹⁰ this will need to be addressed more systematically in the future. And whereas scholarship within historical musicology tends to provide extensive accounts of a small number of specific musical works, this volume explores a narrow range of attributes of copious specific examples from recorded music history. We learn about staging in relation to Britney Spears, studio-sited communication in relation to the Troggs, performance in the studio in relation to Miles Davis, and consumer influence in relation to Shiyani Ngcobo, but not about other aspects of these recording projects. As a result, the book's eclectic theoretical framework isn't applied to examples as extensively as it could be.

Criticisms aside, The Musicology of Record Production is an important document of the growth of a new subfield of music studies. It suggests fruitful avenues of inquiry for analytic and historical approaches to music analysis, especially with regards to the social and collaborative nature of creativity within studio environments.