Fact: the shellac disc — aka the 78 — was the dominant format for the circulation of sound recordings until it was eclipsed by vinyl — the LP —in the 1950s. Saying so seems obvious, indisputable. Yet within this commonplace lurks a bit of complexity. For one thing, every phonograph (aka gramophone) disc was made of many materials in addition to shellac, which made up only a portion of the whole. Somehow this one ingredient garnered synecdochical sway over all of the others, becoming our total idea of the 78 within what we might call the phonographic imaginary. For another thing, calling a ten- or twelve-inch disc played at 78 rpm a ‘format’ confounds additional uses of this same term. Suppose, for instance, we want to call ten-inch discs one format and twelve-inches another? Or suppose by ‘format’ we want to draw a distinction between discs in general — including LPs — and the (non-shellac) cylinder records played on phonographs designed specifically for them? Can ‘format’ be the correct usage in all of these cases? Both of these wrinkles, it should be clear, have less to do with fact than they have to do with language. The curiously expansive and differently imprecise meanings of shellac and format are minor media-historical conundrums of the sort that beg larger questions about media as cultural phenomena and the ways that we approach media as objects of study.

Recent studies have urged us to consider the materialities of popular music to evaluate its environmental cost. This article orients this discussion towards the materiality of popular music production. It argues that industrial discussions on sustainable music production practices can overlook the ideologies associated with recording technologies that prompt consumption activities. It highlights the key themes discussed in the industry regarding sustainability in music production across various media platforms. It then analyses how these themes relate to the construction of recording studios instead of their everyday use. Although technologies like compressors are not typically considered in this discussion, this article suggests that aesthetic preferences often lead to consumption activities that must be factored in when considering the ecological costs of music production. This practice indicates that music producers tend to focus on sustainability practices that will not interrupt their core business.

Before a cyberattack in October 2023 knocked out most of the British Library’s online resources, audible voices from the First World War were only a click away: sixty-six British soldiers, recorded in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany between 1915 and 1918, all reciting the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son.1 In their erstwhile digital home, these recordings sat alongside other surveys of English accents and dialects, offering a taste of the variety and richness of vernacular speech across the British Isles before the influence of radio and television began to iron out regional idiosyncrasies. In the prevailing mood of historical curiosity and uncanny self-recognition surrounding these recordings — English used to sound like that? — little attention was paid either to the conditions of captivity that shaped these men’s lives or to the scholarly project that produced these sounds. Recordings of English speech, in fact, made up only a small fraction of the massive wartime output of the Prussian Phonographic Commission, an interdisciplinary team of German scholars who conducted anthropological, linguistic, and musicological research on soldiers and internees from Allied countries and their colonial territories. In total, some 2600 sound recordings, comprising speech, song, and instrumental music, were made in German POW camps or nearby recording studios (Lange, p. 70). Forgotten or ignored for the better part of a century, the recordings held today in institutions in Berlin and Vienna have been the subject of increased critical attention over the past fifteen years.2 Thanks to this work, we are getting closer to understanding one of the most ambitious yet fatally flawed research projects in the history of world music.

If Paris was known as the capital of the nineteenth century, recent trends in musicology have encouraged some to turn their eyes away from this position in search of new scholarly frameworks. Many researchers have, on the one hand, moved away from capital-city studies and placed renewed emphasis on excavating the diverse regional cultural environments to fully account for a national musical landscape, in France and beyond.1 On the other hand, opera scholars in particular have championed a transnational approach to mapping performers’ careers, the circulation of repertoire, and the development of singing and staging practices.2 Neither approach entirely forsakes the capital, in fact, especially in the case of France. Rather, the highly centralized nature of nineteenth-century French cultural infrastructure has ensured that one of the tantalizing results of shifting the scholarly lens to different geographies is the revelation of new aspects of the significance of the capital’s musical practices when placed in relationship with others, and the parallel interrogation of the scope and source of Paris’s status and influence when inserted within a broader network.3 In other words, recent directions in French music history, in allowing for a more critical assessment of the place and function of the capital from new perspectives, still ignite rather than dim the lure of the musical context of Paris sui generis. Indeed, the monographs reviewed in this article highlight that this is for good reason. These three nineteenth-century studies unveil a multiplicity of the capital’s musical practices, sites, and figures that, just like new geographies, remain unfamiliar to musicologists despite the ubiquity of the capital in scholars’ eyes, and cast new light on Parisian musical history.