Robert Philip's Performing Music in the Age of Recording is a brilliant analysis of how this has affected performance style. It is also incidentally, for much of the time, the best account I know of how musical life in general has changed since the introduction of vinyl and long-playing records in the 1950s, which made it possible for records to invade everyone's home. But it starts even further back with the end of the nineteenth century, when recording was invented by Thomas Edison, who recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into his new machine. The book is full of fascinating detail cogently presented on rehearsal practices and standards, recording on piano rolls, the different instruments used in orchestras, the way records are edited, and the contrasting musical ideals of performers. Philip is large-minded, tolerant, and sympathetic to various positions, and consistently judicious.

His main thesis is that recording has directed performance style into a search for greater precision and perfection, with a consequent loss of spontaneity and warmth. Various expressive devices once common in the early twentieth century have been almost outlawed: "portamento" (sliding from one note to another on a stringed instrument); playing the piano with the hands not quite together (Philip calls this dislocation); arpeggiating chords (not playing all the notes of the chord at the same time but one after another), and flexibility of tempo.