Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology by Paul ThébergeReview by: Leslie C. Gay, Jr.Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 31 (1999), pp. 133-135Published by: International Council for Traditional MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/767982 .

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REVIEWS BOOKS / 133

dispense with notation altogether. Similarly, analyses of specific perform- ances contrast with generalizations about practice based on the authors' knowledge of - and interviews with - musicians or on written sources. One could wish for some dialogue among the authors and for a more penetrating comparative analysis of improvisation. Nonetheless, Nettl is to be congratulated for bringing together such a varied group of authors whose diverse interests and approaches to vastly different musical prac- tices serve to illustrate just how varied the phenomenon of improvisation is on local and global stages.

BEN BRINNER

Theberge, Paul. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press (University Press of New England), 1997. x, 293 pp., illustrations, notes, background sources, bibliography, index.

Paul Theberge's book takes as its focal point a nexus of musical prac- tice, music consumerism, and the use of music technologies in contempo- rary North America and western Europe. Concerned especially with the role of electronic and digital technologies in the production of popular music, this book views musical instrument and recording technologies within a dynamic cultural sphere where issues of technological and musi- cal innovation, musical technique and expression, and authenticity and power come into play. Moreover, throughout the book Theberge explores the routes in which musicians have become "consumers of technology," aligning ". . . musical practices with a kind of behavior akin to a type of consumer practice" that differs "from earlier relationships between mu- sicians and instruments as a means of production" (p. 6). Coming out of the wide theoretical tradition of Raymond Williams' "sociology of cul- ture," Theberge grounds his arguments with contributions from an even wider range of authors, including Max Weber, Robert Walser, Curt Sachs, Christopher Small, Simon Frith, Steven Feld, John Blacking, and Pierre Bourdieu.

The book divides into three sections, each with several chapters. The first section, "Design/Production," tackles the problem of technical inno- vation in instrument design and its relationships to music-makers and a music industry. It does this first through a case study of piano develop- ment, manufacturing, and marketing. Next, the book addresses inven- tion and innovation within contemporary capitalist markets, which have produced such electronic instruments as the vacuum-tube Theremin, the Hammond organ, and the Moog analog synthesizer. Finally, this section of the book examines the adaptation of microprocessor technology to keyboard instruments coupled with the adoption of MIDI as an industry standard.

This last segment brings to the fore two concepts of innovation vital to Theberge - "continuous innovation" and "transectorial innovation." The

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134 / 1999 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

first comes from the work of Yasunori Baba, who argues that the increas- ing pace of technological innovation relies upon "dependencies between small, creative firms and large, scale-intensive corporations" (p. 68). The second, transectorial innovation, develops from the work of Andre Piatier; it occurs when "innovations generated within a specific industrial sector find subsequent application in other, often unrelated sectors" (p. 28). Thus, like the relationships generated by continuous innovation, transectorial innovation ultimately results in a technical interdependence among often disparate industry firms, multinational corporations, and manufacturing sectors (p. 59). These two concepts fall within a much older debate on musical instrument innovation in the writings of Curt Sachs and Erich von Hornbostel, among others - work that Thbberge references. Impor- tantly, these new terms help update notions of instrument innovation in the context of late 20th-century market capitalism. Yet I am surprised by how strongly Theberge's book reproduces the evolutionary bias found in earlier discussions of musical instrument innovation.

The second section of the book deals with mediation. Thbberge moves beyond the mediation of music-sound through audio recordings to ad- dress several other forms of mediation important in the creation of musi- cian communities - music magazines, electronic communication net- works, and user groups. He begins with an overview of music periodical publication in Europe and the United States tied to developments in print technologies. This portion overlaps with the earlier discussion of the pi- ano. In the nineteenth-century United States, the marketing of pianos to women points to the home as "the center of family life and locus of indi- vidual consumption" (p. 99). Moreover, the connection finds correlates in music periodicals where references to music technologies often overlapped with other household technologies, as seen in one periodical from 1880, the Musical and Sewing Machine Gazette. In the segment on the develop- ment of special-interest communities through communication networks, Theberge confronts issues of diffusion, standardization, and democrati- zation, first briefly for "ham radio" operators, then more extensively for computer "user groups," especially those associated with MIDI. What emerges from this discussion is how industry concerns of technological control and economic advancement often conflict with user groups' no- tions of freedom, democracy, and creativity.

Section Three of the book, "Consumption/Use," examines musicians' relationships to instruments, concepts, and performance techniques (the connection to Merriam's model is intentional). For Thbberge, instruments gain definition through their use, not their form: "musical instruments are not 'completed' at the stage of design and manufacture, but, rather, they are 'made-over' by musicians in the process of making music" (pp. 159-160). The chapter entitled "The New 'Sound' of Music," which theo- rizes about aspects of sound related to performance technique and chang- ing music technologies, strikes me as the most original of this section, if not of the entire book. Especially important is Th:berge's analysis of musicians' descriptive language of "sound" as related to instrument and recording technologies. In a later chapter, he ties sound to aspects of

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REVIEWS BOOKS / 135

copyright. These discussions segue into others on how inexpensive, small- scale multitrack recording, digital, and MIDI technologies have increased in importance. What is more significant, these technologies also have cre- ated a new rationalization of musical practice around the "re-production" of sound.

The implications of changing music technologies and their roles in production, distribution, and consumption appear increasingly difficult to ignore here at the cusp of a new century, even for so-called traditional musics. Theberge's book, through its thorough research and thoughtful arguments that span a wide disciplinary scope, offers ethnomusicologists important, welcome insights into these issues.

LESLIE C. GAY, JR.

Eyerman, Ron and Andrew Jamison. Music and Social Movements: Mo- bilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies), 1998. xi, 191 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

The visible (and audible) activity of left-wing social movements in the U.S. during the 1960s helped to spawn a growing literature on the role of music in revolutionary movements and in social change. Building on the work of sociologist Richard Flacks and his collaborators, the authors of Music and Social Movements argue that social movements have cultural as well as political functions, and that they serve as sites for the "mobiliza- tion of tradition and the reconfiguration of identity" in opposition to dominant cultures (p. 173). Indeed, the authors emphasize that new cul- tural forms shaped by political struggle may outlive their original move- ments to provide resources for future political activity. Eyerman and Jamison test this perspective over a range of U.S. social movements (populism, the labor movement, the "united front," the Civil Rights strug- gle, and the 1960s anti-war movement). The penultimate chapter assesses the folk revival in the authors' native Sweden.

One weakness of the book is that readers familiar with the existing literature on these movements (e.g. Denisoff [1971 and 1972], Cantwell [1996], Lieberman [1995], and Pratt [1990]) will find much of this mate- rial very familiar. What the authors bring to these case studies, though, is a consistent framework of analysis, a critique of functionalism in some of the earlier works, a helpful terminology, and a comparative perspective. According to Eyerman and Jamison, music embodies and preserves struc- tures of feeling that contain rational "truth-bearing significance" (p. 161), and hence music helps to structure meaning and "collective identity for- mation" (ibid.).

The attention to the centrality of culture and to the role of music in movements is a very welcome feature. However, the authors' own brand of post-structural agency elides too easily into a form of romanticized heroism, as in their characterization of figures such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez as "exemplary actors with truth-

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