Abstract
The introduction presents an overview of recent scholarly developments in the field of recorded music research and contextualises the book’s aims. Since musicology’s ‘performative turn’ in the late twentieth century, scholars have engaged keenly in the study of recordings as historical texts or traces of performance, as well as in the study of studios and record production as the sites of diverse sociocultural practices. Relatively little, however, has been done to bring these newer developments into music curricula. This book seeks to address how the ever-expanding and evolving interest in recorded music, whether in material artefacts or in creative collaborative processes inside and outside of the studio, can be productively integrated into higher music education in order to inspire and better prepare today’s musicians and scholars. The introduction proposes ways in which the book’s broader themes—mediation, (re)creative performance, and education—coalesce into a productive dialogue with one another to promote new understandings of the musical past and present, enhance and diversify creative music teaching and learning, and stimulate reform of the institutional processes and structures that frame higher music education.