IASPM Canada 2023 Book prize winner: Beverley Diamond's (2021) On Record: Audio Recording, Mediation, and Citizenship in Newfoundland and Labrador

Published by McGill-Queen's University Press in 2021, On Record: Audio Recording, Mediation, and Citizenship in Newfoundland and Labrador offers a rich history of sound recording in Newfoundland and Labrador that features case studies and examples of various recording artists, performers, genres, studios throughout the province.

Throughout the work, Diamond draws extensive interviews she has conducted with musicians and sound artists over a 20-year+ period, analysis of various albums, songs, instrumentation and album art, as well as archival holdings in Newfoundland. In addition to reviewing, organizing and evaluating the archive of Newfoundland and Labrador audio recordings, the wealth of interviews and testimonies constitute a crucial addition to the archive itself. Diamond’s judicious use of co-authoring, as well, demonstrates how scholars in the field might successfully explore new forms of partnership which have yet to appear extensively in our fields.

Diamond critically frames her work with scholarship in ethnomusicology, history, sound studies and genre studies, and she demonstrates how her alliance studies model serves scholars who are interested in exploring questions of local/national and mainstreamness/distinctiveness, and expectations of various audiences. Considerations of the links between sound recordings and citizenship, belonging, professionalization/democratization, sonic signatures, politics and parody, memorialization, nostalgia, genres studies, folklore studies and network actor theory serve as models for scholars engaging with similar issues in contemporary music scholarship. Particularly crucial in the contemporary political moment, Diamond unpacks musical recording practices as a means for discussing settler-colonial and Indigenous relations by defining Newfoundland and Labrador as two important places that are both connected and diverse in identity politics and sounds.