Abstract
The use of early recordings in musicological and historical performance practice research is hardly a rarity anymore: Will Crutchfield's pioneering article "Vocal ornamentation in Verdi: the phonographic evidence" appeared almost forty years ago.
1
Some of the first monographs dedicated to the subject (Robert Philip's two books on orchestral playing and Timothy Day's A century of recorded music)
2
now enjoy a place of fundamental importance in reading lists about historical performance practices. In the context of their time (early 1990s to mid-2000), they are perhaps best seen as monumental, solitary enterprises rather than as the avant-garde of a more all-encompassing or collaborative trend within scholarship. Nevertheless, pioneering as they were, it should not be forgotten that those years saw many other illustrious, if isolated, examples of early recordings being used to explore issues of performance practice in specific eras and repertoires.
3