Discography: Its Prospects and Problems

Any discussion of discography is hampered by the fact that there is no formal agreement about what the subject really is. Discography is a discipline in its formative stages, guided almost entirely by the past example of its practitioners and not by a single set of rules or principles. Discography has recently begun to attract some scholarly attention, most notably in Lewis Foreman's Systematic Discography,' which unfortunately promises more system than it actually delivers, and in the volume of the proceedings of the two annual conferences on discography at Rutgers University's Institute of Jazz Studies,2 which treats it from the perspective of jazz. Gordon Stevenson,3 summarizing the thoughts of many on the subject, has described it as "the documentation of all types of reproduced sound preserved on all types of artifacts (e.g., commercial, non-commercial, disc, tape, piano rolls, wire recordings, movie soundtracks, air checks from radio and television-literally any type of recorded sound)." Discography can also be defined by considering its parallels with bibliography.4 But bibliographic parallels just provide a framework for understanding discography and cannot be carried too far without slighting the special characteristics of sound recordings as both auditory and physical documents. Defining discography and its peculiar needs is best served by taking into account the special nature of the recorded document. Like motion pictures and video recordings but unlike photography, a sound recording captures in mechanical or electronic form a sound event taking place