Vaughan Williams’s recorded music is a vast subject that has scarcely been studied. This chapter presents a first major step into this research area. It considers early recordings of his works from the 1920s and 1930s, addressing how they were shaped by the technical limitations and market forces of the British industry during this era. Brief playing times and poor sound quality for these recordings meant that art songs and folk-song arrangements dominate the composer’s early catalogue. Early recordings of larger works were often limited primarily to occasions of special advocacy and funding. Later, as demand, technology, and company resources allowed, the number and range of Vaughan Williams’s compositions on record increased. This chapter also shows how reviews of these early recordings reflected overall attitudes about his music, with reviewers expressing mixed reactions to perceived folk and modal aspects of the few works they were able to hear on record. Since a fuller catalogue of Vaughan Williams’s recorded music emerged only over decades, the vicissitudes of the industry cannot be separated from the development of his overall reception during this crucial time.

Messiaen held the titular position as organist at L’église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris for more than sixty years. He recorded most of his own works on this instrument, so this chapter begins by noting the importance of these recordings, and in particular the way they proscribed a “manner of performance” for his organ works that would be dominant for more than fifty years. It then discusses recordings by other organists on other instruments, and how they differ from the composer’s recordings. The discussion focuses on those who have recorded the entire repertoire, but also considers notable recordings of single pieces.

This chapter draws on the author’s experience as a musicologist, philosopher, and ornithologist to examine different perspectives on birdsong in Messiaen, including verisimilitude, ecology, and Messiaen’s practice of notation. It places Messiaen’s birdsong in the context of his thought and examines the meaning of this important formant and creative source in Messiaen’s work.

Matthew Schellhorn, who attended lessons with Loriod in the 2000s, discusses her background and her personal and artistic involvement with Messiaen. He examines her as an artist in her own right, discussing her discography, her own compositions, and her activities as a teacher, and thereby brings her character into focus.

The story of how medieval polyphony and song have been approached in more recent times is the subject of our final chapter. We look at how the appearance of modern editions of medieval poetry allowed composers in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Carl Orff and Benjamin Britten, to set medieval song-texts to new music. It would take until after World War II, however, for the music of medieval polyphony and song to reach wide audiences, and we chart the history of the recordings, concerts, and festivals that have brought this music to listeners from 1950 onwards. We examine the approaches of the pioneering ensembles and directors who first performed and recorded this music in the 1950s and 1960s, looking at their influences and attitudes towards the many unknowns regarding its original performance practice. Situating the re-awakening of medieval music in the wider context of the early music revival and the ‘authentic’ (later, ‘historically-informed’) performance movements, we then move on to consider ‘medievalist’ music, especially in film, television, and video games with medieval settings.

On 16 February 1938, Igor Stravinsky and his son, Soulima, recorded Mozart’s Fugue in C minor for Two Pianos K. 426.1 Lasting less than five minutes, the performance filled out the sixth side of Columbia’s album featuring Stravinsky’s Concerto for Two Solo Pianos (1932; 1934/5). It is a singular disc, the only studio recording of Stravinsky playing the music of someone other than himself. Yet its unique existence is mostly ignored or disregarded. Tim Page, in his liner notes from 2003, focused his attention on the Concerto and mentions, dismissively, the Mozart Fugue – ‘thrown in for good measure’.2 Scholars looking at Stravinsky’s performances tend to focus on his role as a conductor, interpreting his own music. This is not surprising given the preponderance of recordings with Stravinsky conducting Stravinsky and the predisposition of scholars to focus on the compositions of artists rather than their identities as performers.

In his autobiography the fifty-three-year-old Stravinsky claimed: ‘Composers may well envy the lot of painters, sculptors, and writers, who communicate directly with their public without having recourse to intermediaries.’1 This longing to present a musical work as a self-contained entity, as an objet d’art, became central to his promotion of neoclassical music, and he was most outspoken about this in the article introducing his Octet in 1923, where he stated: ‘My Octuor is a musical object.’2