‘Phonomusicology’ is the term suggested by Stephen Cottrell, in one of the essays of this volume, as a designation for ‘the study of recorded music, including its contexts of production and patterns of consumption’ (pp. 15f.). The necessity of having to specify that a branch of musicology should have to do with sound may appear somewhat ironic, and this terminological twist is perhaps significant mainly from a rather narrow intra-disciplinary perspective, as a reflection of the long-lamented ‘notation-centricity’ of musicology. Whether subsumable under this disciplinary neologism or not, a rapid expansion during the last two decades of scholarship on the historical, social and aesthetic aspects of the application of recording technology to music is an observable fact. Matters of recording technology may appear especially pertinent to popular music studies, as most comprehensive definitions of ‘popular music’ include some reference to media – recording and broadcasting – technology. However, technological mediation has deeply affected all musical genres, Western art music as well as ‘traditional’ musics in Western and non-Western societies. The present volume presents an attempt to cover a wide range of musical genres in its discussions of the ramifications of recording technology for the production, dissemination and reception of music, in the process challenging a number of more or less genre-specific established notions of what the constitutive features of a ‘musical work’ or a ‘musical performance’ are.

The essays of the volume are arranged into four main thematic sections, although the thematic areas thus defined to some extent overlap. The first section, ‘Recordings and their contexts’, contains mainly theoretical discussions of central issues, such as notions of ‘naturalistic reproduction’ of live performance or the fidelity of the recording to the ‘original’. A striking detail in this connection is that two of the essays in this section – Peter Johnson's ‘Illusion and aura in the classical audio recording’ and Andrew Blake's ‘Ethical and cultural issues in the digital era’ – both invoke Walter Benjamin's well known concept of ‘aura’, but with differing results. Johnson claims that the classical audio recording ‘can be heard as vibrantly, even ecstatically auratic’ (p. 38), while Blake predicts ‘the end of the aura’ (p. 52) as a consequence of digital audio technology. This implicit contradiction appears an apt illustration of the fact that this Benjaminian concept may turn to be out rather tricky when it comes to applications to music, of which Benjamin himself says little. It seems that what is at stake here is the, as it were, ‘multiple articulation’ of aura in music: the concept may be (and has been) applied to (a) the aura of the musical work, in the Western classical sense, as a unique representation of its historical origin, to (b) the aura of the unique musical performance, as a likewise unique representation of its origin, or to (c) the presence of the unique sonic characteristics of the particular recording – Lee Brown's ‘work of phonography’ – at the moment of reproduction. It would seem that the concept may be quite useful for the mapping out, on a theoretical level, of exactly how recording technology has affected listeners' notions of the exact nature of what they are listening to in various historical and social contexts; albeit somewhat inconclusive on this matter, these essays open up important issues for further theoretical investigation.

The two middle sections of the volume contain mainly empirical case studies of historical or genre-specific recording practices or uses of recorded music. The essays in the section ‘The recording process’ chart the interaction of technological factors, aesthetic concerns and the social organisation of the production and the reception of music in different musical genres, such as ‘world music’, classical music and jazz. The section ‘Recordings as texts’ contains essays discussing the use of music recordings as tools for various kinds of investigations, for instance, historiographical, ethnographical or related to performance-practice studies, or as source material in new and innovative approaches to musical analysis. The latter category includes Serge Lacasse's analysis of paralinguistic features and ‘phonographic staging effects’ in recorded vocal performances, concluding that such features contribute substantially to ‘the richness and expressivity found in popular singing’ (p. 244). In a broader perspective, Allan Moore discusses the analytical consequences of the shift of the implicit work-concept in popular music from the ‘song’ to the ‘track’, the recording as ‘the end itself’ (p. 255). His conclusion is that this shift represents ‘a move from abstract to concrete, from “work” towards “performance”’, but also ‘from object towards practice’ (p. 265).

The fourth section, ‘Sonic creations and re-creations’ shifts the emphasis back to more theoretically inclined discussions of various ways in which recorded sound may function as raw material for new ways of creating music. For instance, Virgil Moorefield analyses ‘covers’, ‘remixes’ and ‘mash-ups’ as different forms of ‘metastructural composition’ and Albin Zak discusses how different forms of electronic studio processing of recorded sound have constituted an increasingly important style-defining factor in the history of popular music.

Tony Gibbs' epilogue to the volume presents a thought-provoking prediction of future developments in recording technology and its social uses. Here, not unexpectedly, he points to digitisation and computer processing as central factors contributing to a continuing separation of recorded sound from concrete sound-carrying physical objects and an increasing importance of technologically produced non-predetermined interactive soundscapes. This is characterised as a process of de-reification of the recorded product as well as of the means of its creation, resulting in ‘an abstracted product’ being created by ‘equally abstracted means’ (p. 332).

Taken together, these essays point out several paths for an intensified study of music as recorded sound. It could be argued that several of the essays resemble established modes of musicological scholarship in that the discussion of ‘patterns of consumption’ mainly takes the form of what Jean-Jacques Nattiez has termed ‘external esthesics’, that is, analysis of the reception of music by way of inferences from what the analyst may observe in the musical object analysed (although here, this object is the recording rather than the score). The book does not contain much actual reception ethnography nor any far-reaching theorisation of the reception of recorded music, other than that departing from considerations of production. Not all of the essays stand out as equally ground-breaking and innovative; together, however, they provide a broad and comprehensive picture of the current state of ‘phonomusicology’.