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The not-so-bygone worlds of music and colonialism in the twentieth century have yielded a wealth of scholarly 'paper knowledge' in the twenty-first of which to build off new archival-musicological work. This article takes a particular archiving direction by turning to paper itself – and pivots the postcolonial pen around the texts and textures of re-engaging colonial history in postcolonial music scholarship. I explore these writing stakes through my adopted narrative of 'the post/colonial music archive', as shaped by paper and paper's sounding elements of tone and voice. Crisscrossing between the colonial moment and the postcolonial pen, I straddle this developing narrative of the archive, and the registers and inflections of extant source narration for what they can jointly vocalize about the music making of the Municipal Brass Band in 1930s treaty port Shanghai, and the Sino-British Club in postwar colonial Hong Kong – two ostensible musical worlds of 'Britain in China' in the twentieth century, here thrown into disarray by the post/colonial archive's own inchoate, counter-tales. Ultimately, in this process, postcolonial music scholarship gains further traction and meaning as a multi-articulating inquiry – and a turn of mind that does not let colonial history and its persistent challenges for writing go askew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, American newspapers enjoyed high circulations while presenting readers with diverse and plentiful content. After 1920, radio broadcasting made even more information available for public consumption, giving audience members an abundant range of media choices. During a time of plenty for readers and listeners, companies in the business of media struggled with the opposite problem: scarcity. As the amount of media content proliferated, the practical ability to disseminate it was determined by the access to scarce resources, and this was true for both radio broadcasting and newspaper publishing. In many respects, the history of the American mass media in the early twentieth century might best be told as a tale of two scarcities, one—the electromagnetic spectrum—defined by absolute limits and the other—the newsprint—defined by access to markets for a particular material, the supply of which often fluctuated in availability and price. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]