Abstract
Historically informed performance practice is inherently complex; not only are instruments and playing styles relative to specific cultural, social and historical contexts, literary sources are often subjective and, as with the performances that they describe, a product of their own time. Practice can also be informed by examination of early recordings, which serve to illuminate stylistic conventions of past eras. By studying such recordings, the principles of previous performances and interpretations can be systematically studied and understood. These recordings do not merely offer a window into the sound-world of past performances, however; they also offer a wealth of information about the physical nature of performance itself. As such, they may serve as a model, or exemplar for contemporary performances of the same works. Despite this, contemporary performers should not merely copy and paste what they hear through such recordings; the interpretative choices made by recording musicians were likely to have been specific to both the recording medium and the instruments of the time; since many of the physical, haptic and proprioceptive cues employed by those musicians cannot be abstracted from, or identified through listening alone, one must instead strive to understand the stylistic conventions in the context of the recording medium originally employed.