The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field ed. by Simon Frith, Simon Zagorski-Thomas (review)

The Journal on the Art of Record Production was launched in 2007, prompting Simon Frith to hail ‘the emergence of a new academic field rather than simply a further subdivision of musicology’. At a time when interdisciplinarity and putative paradigm shifts are seemingly heralded at every turn, this is a bold claim. On a practical level, it is true that text-based musicological approaches are insufficient for dealing with sound recordings; a methodology that is sensitive to both fixed and temporal qualities is paramount if the recording’s status as always already mediated is to be accepted. Musicology’s performative turn has tended to treat the recording medium as a transparent vehicle for performance. By contrast, a recent spate of literature on musical mediation works from the assumption that the recording medium is opaque and highly negotiated. The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader joins this literature but goes further in attempting to legitimate producers and engineers as practitioners of art. It seeks to celebrate studio personnel as prime agents in the collaborative process that is music-making, or as editors Frith and Simon Zagorski-Thomas put it in the Afterword, ‘recording . . . is not something done to music but a process in which sound becomes music’ (p. 277). Several of the Reader’s contributors themselves enjoyed (or continue to enjoy) professional careers in the studio, bringing a wealth of emic knowledge to their writings and the Art of Record Production’s annual conferences (hereafter ARP). In this sense, ARP and its publications provide new vistas for practice-based research, with the potential to explain activities that were once considered the province of unmeasurable intuition or highly technical craft.

The Reader’s chapters are drawn largely from ARP conference papers and grouped into three sections: historical approaches, theoretical approaches, and case studies. The three sections are divided by interludes of comments and commentaries by industry professionals, a format that readers will be familiar with from the ‘personal takes’ interspersed among the chapters of The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (ed. Nicholas Cook et al. (Cambridge, 2009)). The comments range from specific responses to the chapters, to more general accounts—some anecdotal, others theorized—of first-hand experiences in the studio. Sometimes the comments sit a little uneasily next to one another and it is not always clear how they have been ordered. Interlude 3, for example, seems to deal with links between academia and the industry, prompted by Zagorski-Thomas’s and Katia Isakoff’s questions on how the two might serve each other. Among this discussion, ex-new wave producer Mike Howlett’s paragraph on how to make an artist comfortable when recording appears somewhat arbitrarily placed (p. 272). Nonetheless, the Reader takes on an extra dimension when its interludes and chapters are cross-referenced, offering a sort of ‘auto-ethnography’ that deserves interrogation. And some of the interludes’ most innocuous comments draw attention to fascinating avenues for research, such as ex-Motown engineer Bob Olhsson’s remark that ‘[o]verdubbing had been reasonably common beginning in the acoustic era but was considered a crutch that one never discussed in public’ (p. 93). Overdubbing has been discussed in relation to the post-war multi-tracking of Les Paul and others, but if there is a pre-history that stretches back to direct-to-disc recording then this warrants urgent investigation. As Jonathan Sterne and other historians of the long twentieth century of sound reproduction have demonstrated, the roots of audio technology run deep into the nineteenth century.

The Reader’s generic scope is broad; indeed, one of the advantages of studying production values is the potential to unearth commonalities across different musical genres. The repertory covered ranges from mainstream classical (Andrew Blake contextualizes the career of EMI producer Suvi Raj Grubb) to Jamaican dub (Sean Williams...