Review of Music and the Second Industrial Revolution, ed. Massimiliano Sala (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019).

Abstract

Telephones to phonographs, moving pictures to the Moulin Rouge: the fin-de-siècle 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” (p. xi) 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).