Early Recordings and Musical Style

For a long time, musicians treated early recordings as little more than old-fashioned curiosities. Scholars and performers now see them differently, as historical documents that capture how composers and the players they worked with actually performed.

Robert Philip argues that recordings made in the early twentieth century are a valuable and largely overlooked source for the history of performance. The study traces how tastes in instrumental playing shifted across the first half of the century.

Edition note: published by Cambridge University Press. ISBN-13 9780521607445.