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Music and the Second Industrial Revolution. Edited by Massimiliano Sala. (Music, Science & Technology, vol. 2.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2019. [xiv, 498 p. ISBN 9782503585710 (hardcover), $150.] Abstracts, biographies, index of names.
Telephones to phonographs, moving pictures to the Moulin Rouge: the fin de siecle continues to excite the musicological imagination. Some elements of this historical milieu have long been familiar from studies of musical modernism. More recently, especially under the influence of sound studies, scholars have turned their attention to the technological and societal transformations that characterized the decades around 1900, thus reimagining the soundscapes and auditory cultures of the time. It is against this background that the present volume on music and the Second Industrial Revolution must be seen. Indeed, for editor Massimiliano Sala, a volume on this topic "was necessary" because "in an epochal paradigm shift, the Second Industrial Revolution transitioned the Western world from the modern into the contemporary era, not only by way of new scientific and technological discoveries, but also (and precisely because) everyday life and the very way of thinking things was gradually being modified" (p. xi).
This idea of "necessity" is a curious one, and it exposes a central challenge of such a wide-ranging project. Despite Sala's assertion of its historical import in his brief introduction, I am not convinced the term "the Second Industrial Revolution" functions as a sufficiently strong organizing principle for the chapters that follow. While the title of the volume promises a specifically industrial focus or at least a technocentric approach, many contributors simply use "the Second Industrial Revolution" as a stand-in for "modernity," "the fin de siecle" or other loose denominators for the historical period in question; others avoid historiographical reflection altogether. Yet this is a missed opportunity to broaden our understanding of the sonic fabric of late nineteenth-century society. Even Sala's above-quoted statement raises important further questions. What of the "non-Western" world, for instance, large swaths of which were under the control of colonizing Western powers and which most certainly felt the impact of the Second Industrial Revolution as a result?
The volume's eighteen chapters are written in four different languages (English, French, Italian, and Spanish) and divided into four sections: "New Urban Perspectives and Everyday Life," "The Development of Instruments [sic]...