Wrestling with the Recording Angel

Every lover of classical music with a taste for sound recordings’ historiography should peruse two valuable books above all, both from the early 2000s. One is Performing Music in the Age of Recording (2004), by Robert Philip of Britain’s Open University; the other, from four years earlier, is A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History, by Timothy Day of Royal Holloway University in London. It is neither Philip’s fault nor Day’s that since their respective volumes’ publication, two factors have so dislocated the classical recording sector as to make some of both men’s observations retrospectively outmoded. Of these factors, one has been dramatic but for the most part morally neutral; the other has been spectacularly disruptive.

The morally neutral factor is the recording industry’s shift away from the single CD towards gigantic boxed sets, often devoted to one particular performing artist or label, and often containing up to 100 discs. Heaven knows who…