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The Art of Record Production: an introductory reader for a new academic field

Following the founding and successful launch of the Art of Record Production (ARP) conference and journal in 2005, at the instigation of Simon Zagorski-Thomas (SZT), an approach was made to Simon Frith with a proposal to co-edit a book with the intention to formalise the disciplinary consensus arising from within this emergent research community. From a list of twenty-five authors contributing to ARP conferences, fifteen were selected and organised into structural divisions. SZT’s vision for ARP as a nexus between academic theory and creative practice resulted in his commissioning, and subsequent editing, of the industry interludes featured in the book. The introduction was written jointly, with the assignment of editing chapters divided equally.

This book is an important milestone in the establishment of record production as a field of academic study. The ARP project, and the book in particular, has facilitated the establishment of a community of like-minded academics, and promoted an agenda that is both open-ended and interdisciplinary in nature.

As with other recent work in ethnomusicology and performance studies, the book has been successful in engaging practitioners in the theoretical debate around practice; the book is therefore not only a seminal work in a new academic field, and not just a key text for those in the recording arts and popular music studies, but also another step in the pursuit of a broader musicology.

SZT’s chapter examines a wide range of influences on a narrow topic, and further demonstrates the need for such a broad approach. His aim: to examine the creative systems in which the production of recorded popular occurred in the UK and US in the 1970s, was achieved through an inter-disciplinary combination of musical, social, technological and economic factors.