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Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. By Paul Theberge. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. 293 pp.
Any Sound You Can Imagine is perhaps a misleading title, since this book is not about creating sounds from the imagination; rather, its subject is the changes occurring in musical practices that have led to the emphasis on the acquisition of sounds, that is to say, not the production of sounds so much as their reproduction. This shift has resulted in friction between traditional ways of understanding the meaning of musical skill and newer forms that are currently emerging. Thus the central issue of concern in Theberge's book can be summed up by the following passage: "The tension between the belief that acquiring musical skill requires concentrated effort (a work ethic) and the marketing requirement that music-making be seen as a form of entertainment (a leisure ethic) has become one of the more enduring ideological and economic conflicts for the musical instrument trade" (p. 31). As he goes on to illustrate throughout the rest of the text, it is the transformation of music production into the latter-the reconfiguration of musicians as consumers-that takes up the larger part of the story of the transformation of both musical practices and the music industry in the twentieth century.
As Theberge's book attests, this has been (and continues to be) a complex process, requiring substantial enquiry into, and excavation of, a number of different sites. As the divisions of the book indicate, making sense of this transformation requires a careful analysis of the relationships between technical innovation, musical practices, manufacturing, marketing, trade literature, and so on. Theberge suggests that much of conventional musicology is blind to these complex relationships and cannot therefore account for the reorganization and reconfiguration of social and economic relations that lead to changes in musical practice. He offers his approach as a corrective to the narrow focus of conventional musicological approaches.
As a working composer and studio owner, I can attest through direct experience to the validity of Theberge's claim concerning the way in which music production is increasingly mediated by consumption practices. The pressure is especially evident in pop and dance music, where the constraints of the genres have led to innovation taking place at...