It sounded too awful for human consumption. ... There was a kind of foggy dreariness about it that chilled the spirits. ... [It evoked] one of those dim tragedies of peasant life which we return to the library after a quick glance at page one. I sold the machine next day and felt like the Ancient Mariner when he got rid of the albatross.

This is but a more amusingly phrased variant of the emotions which several thousand musicians have felt about the whole recording process: they cannot live with it, or without it. Intelligent surveys of the musician-recording symbiosis have been all too meager. Several glorified supermarket tabloids (of the "Who's Pavarotti Porking 2Nite?" genre) exist. So do impenetrable semiotic musings replete with tributes to Derrida. So does a narrowly discographic literature, wherein owlish trainspotters feud over the matrix numbers of Take 1 versus Take 2 for Alfred Cortot’s 1928 version of Chopin’s C sharp Minor Prelude.

But a serious, properly researched general history of recordings versus live performances, and how each interacted with the other ... well, best of luck finding one. Till now, with this tour de force – masterwork is, in these circumstances, a perfectly legitimate term – by a lecturer at Britain's Open University. Robert Philip wrote impressive music journalism for years in the long-defunct monthly Records and Recording, but not even his best insights there hinted at what he has achieved here.

Classical record buyers form a tiny minority of record buyers in general. Philip is consciously appealing to a tiny minority within a tiny minority: historic recordings buffs, who are now rather well catered for through Naxos, Pearl, and other adventurous CD firms, but who previously had to cope with the whims of mail-order special-interest record societies. Of course, in suitably postmodern collegiate circles, the very definition of a historic recording becomes almost infinitely pliant. Some of us know music undergraduates who have never once seen an LP, and whose idea of Dark Age conducting is not a Willem Mengelberg but a Neville Marriner. Philip operates at a much higher historiographical standard.

His main interest, as that of all such buffs must be regarding orchestral music, lies not in the very earliest discs but in those that came after the mid-1920s' establishment of electric recording. Orchestral pre-electrics resulted from so many (then) inevitable studio distortions as to be freakish even to read about, let alone to hear. A typical studio ensemble, we learn, would comprise only six violins and a few violas, a clarinet, a cello, a bassoon, a contrabassoon and, rather than a double-bass, a tuba. Even with a respected conductor like Arthur Nikisch at the helm, the sound quality suggested a short-wave broadcast from Mogadishu. Cuts to scores were legion and shameless: the first "complete" recordings of Schubert song-cycles had items missing. Almost always the performer remained – with varying degrees of consciousness – under pressure to fit his musical conceptions within 78 rpm side-lengths' procrustean bounds, although sometimes Toscanini and Stokowski would reduce this handicap by having two recording-machines going alternately. English conductor Sir Adrian Boult, aged 82, ruefully remembered his 78 rpm days: "When you have it in mind that you have got to get to a certain point in 4½ minutes ... you are inclined to hurry even though you know it is really all right." Boult's sheer dearth of charisma makes him a more reliable witness to studio operations than is any swashbuckling shaman of the Stokowski or Furtwängler sort.

To counterbalance its vices, 78 rpm technology possessed certain virtues that the tape-recorder's 1940s advent ended: "There was no safety net", Philip reminds us, "in the days before tape-editing. What you hear on the disc is what was actually achieved." Yet even the tape-recorder failed immediately to impose on music-lovers today's CD-generated expectations of flawlessness. Philip rightly observes that even super-technicians like Sir Georg Solti, in his thrilling 1960s Wagner records, permitted occasional wind intonation inadmissible now. (As, contemporaneously, did Swiss maestro Ernest Ansermet with his Geneva orchestral discs; but then Ansermet, unlike Solti, laid no claims to a micromanager's exactitude.) One reason Western orchestras now find it so hard to sell concert tickets is the automatic assumption that their playing shall aspire to the condition of a multi-take CD. If the amazing thing about 78s' shortcomings is that any great records whatever came forth, the amazing thing about orchestras in 2006 is that they can still be motivated to give outstanding concerts at all, especially now that CD prices go ever downward while concert ticket prices for the biggest New York and London events continue to rise.

Millions, then, are deriving their entire musical experience from CDs, while foregoing live events. Who wins from this bargain: Faust or Mephistopheles? Let no-one attempt to settle that quarrel by turning Luddite. We who grew up in rural seclusion – this reviewer’s native village resembled Yoknapatawpha County – feel deep gratitude that, thanks to hi-fi, we came to know the greatest Wagner and Verdi operas decades before our nearest cities staged any of them. Nonetheless, is it truly healthful that in 99 Anglophone households out of every hundred, domestic singing and playing (before 1914, invitations to British parties would often contain the words "Please bring your music") have completely given way to iPod autism? Philip cannot conclusively answer this question. Nor will readers of his book. On the one hand ... on the other ... as Bernard Levin once asked after enduring that gambit from a dithering Anglican cleric: "What would you do if you only had one hand?"

Alas, Philip fails to discuss any recordings by pianist Paul Wittgenstein – the philosopher's brother – who really did have only one hand; but elsewhere this volume's treatment of chamber-music, piano, and orchestral discs inspires awe. (Opera, choral music, and the organ are a bit slighted.) Philip displays astounding erudition in, and fair-minded reportage of, the self-contradictions so obvious in most composers’ records of their own music.

Bartók, as both recordings and listeners' accounts show, performed his own piano pieces with great allure and freedom: wholly unlike the thumping, tool-and-die-factory inexpressiveness which the very combination of "Bartók" and "pianism" in the same sentence presupposes. Elgar recorded his Nimrod at a pace so rapid that any modern conductor trying it would be jeered off the rostrum. (Is Elgar's haste due – as Philip argues – to the piece’s absence of funereal connotations in Elgar's own day? Or was Elgar, like Boult, simply over-aware of side-length limits?) Sometimes a composer simply forgets what he sought. Sometimes, as with Messiaen, he marries a performer who recasts what the score originally requested. Sometimes, like Stravinsky, he appears afflicted with historical amnesia, willfully flouting his own printed requirements as to notes, let alone tempi. Sometimes he is so grateful for any rendition that he publicly endures playing which, secretly, he loathes. Left to himself, he would – as Schoenberg admitted he did – prefer the performance which occurred inside his own head, during composition, to even the best interpreters in this life. What do composers want, in recordings that they either make or sanction, and what do they just put up with? Between the manuscript paper and the microphone falls the shadow. Probably the best compromise occurs when a composer has a particular interpreter whom he trusts: as Gustav Holst and Vaughan Williams trusted Boult, or as Debussy trusted the young Ansermet.

Otherwise it is all too frequently open slather. Discussing the apparently inverse relationship between a composer's punctiliousness and the average performer's ability to register it, Philip quotes Elgar's eloquent grumble:

Beethoven and Brahms ... wrote practically nothing but allegro and andante, and there seems to be no difficulty. I've done everything I can to help musicians, but my efforts appear only to confuse them.

Verdi expressed himself similarly in his last years, complaining that conductors had largely ignored his music's expression marks until Toscanini arrived. And yet, as Philip also admits, merely imitating Elgar's own recordings cannot guarantee artistic success. Such is recording: paradoxical Pelion piled on enigmatic Ossa.

Dipping a toe into recording history would soon make even the most blinkered Leo Strauss defender into a historicist. Take the subject of portamento, by which pre-Toscanini string players would slide quickly from note to note. No orchestra does – and most orchestras simply cannot do – anything of the kind now, which does not stop certain mischievous podium eccentrics like Roger Norrington from aiming at "authentic performances". (Critical consensus accords Norrington the unsavory honor of having perpetrated the world’s most trivial, embarrassing, musically and spiritually illiterate Beethoven symphony records, which perhaps achieve their apotheosis in an Eroica funeral march almost indistinguishable from Mad Dogs and Englishmen.)

But then if tape-era recording history in general is – as it may well be – a case of "fake it till you make it", numerous period-instrument releases of 15 to 20 years ago managed new apogees or nadirs of sham. Writing today when passions have cooled, musicologists can now admit the truth which in the 1980s and 1990s routinely destroyed the careers of those who uttered it: namely, that most early-music performers simply lacked the technical chops to survive outside their own ghetto. One battle-weary record producer, temporarily abandoning his early-music labors to record a virtuoso pianist, explained: "Nobody goes into a studio to record virtuoso piano music without being sure that they can play it." At least Trilby, when Svengali masterminded her, did deliver the goods.

Too much in Philip's coverage must be slighted in any review of less than monograph length. His fascinating discussions of early 20th century pianists' rhythmic approaches, as captured on shellac (the modern assumption that melody line and bass line will automatically synchronize meant little or nothing to pianists before World War II); Paul Taffanel, a French flautist who remade woodwind playing in his own elegant image; Pablo Casals, revolutionizing cello technique by (in Philip's words) "fingering [that] involved the use of stretching to avoid many of the traditional shifts" ... so it goes. Of Philip’s researches, and of precious few other musicological analyses, it can be boldly said: any music-lover at any time can profit from studying them.

The above paragraphs have possibly focused overmuch on recordings' problems and myriad ambiguities. Does a study of historical recordings lead, therefore, to philosophical disgust with the whole recording method? Quite the opposite, actually. Philip, a true believer, has a gift for igniting similar enthusiasm in others. From his concluding pages:

When we become disillusioned with modern recordings, all we have to do is put on the Busch Quartet playing late Beethoven, or Casals playing Bach, to hear the sound of musicians who, despite their masterly technical command, were uninterested in the smooth perfection of today, and were anxious only to make the music "speak". … Often [with new recordings’ eccentricities] the impression is that these things are being done for the sake of variety, or because the conductor is bored or wishes to attract attention. It is much rarer to feel that these novelties are there to serve the music. One’s reaction is usually "Goodness, can that be how it goes?" With the greatest music-making, however, the reaction is "Of course, this is what the composer meant."

To which one would add a variant of Orwell's adage about good novels: "Good recordings are made by people who are not frightened." Which means, by definition, people who are not spin-doctored.

R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia.

© The American Conservative, 2006