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This article examines how musicians use recordings as learning resources in preparing for performance. While previous research has partially acknowledged the contribution of external factors to self-regulated learning, the specific impact of recordings on performers' approaches to practising remains largely uncharted. A survey was designed to assess the use and importance of recordings on musicians' listening and practising behaviours, their preferences when choosing recordings, and the type of influence exerted by recordings over self-regulatory processes. Respondents (N = 204) completed an online survey, and the data were analysed according to level of expertise: advanced music students (n = 147) and professional musicians (n = 57). The results show clear differences between students and professionals in the frequency of use and level of reliance on recordings, with students consistently exhibiting a greater preference for these resources. Students were more likely to listen to recordings and, consequently, change aspects of their interpretations in the early stages of practising. Additionally, students were influenced by other people's recommendations, especially their teachers', and by other performers' reputations when choosing recordings. The need to develop a distinct style had a positive influence on students' practising and performing habits. The study shows that listening to recordings forms an integral part of selfregulated learning activities and contributes to musicians' development by increasing musical knowledge and stylistic awareness.

How we listen to music and respond to its media and contexts has changed significantly since the invention of sound recording. Today’s musicians have countless opportunities to listen to others’ interpretations given the vast availability of past and contemporary repertories through the global reach of recordings. This study investigated the extent to which the growing archive of recordings provides a valuable resource for performers’ creativity. Although musical performance is a particularly porous domain for influence through either deliberate or spontaneous assimilation of expressive variation from other aural sources, little empirical research exists on influence in performance and specifically on the influence of recordings. Qualitative data were obtained via an online questionnaire to identify how and in what ways the use and influence of recordings have changed over the course of classical performers’ training or professional careers. Respondents’ ( N = 130) comments were analysed using a thematic inductive approach. The emerging themes reveal an overall increased level of use of recordings now relative to the past, a largely positive contribution of recordings in shaping musical development, including the role of recordings in self-regulated learning, a largely positive attitude to the influence of others’ interpretations, a means of developing expressions of self-identity in relation to others and a route to acquiring a more critical and discerning mode of listening to recordings. Implications for music education are discussed in terms of how listening to recordings, in both formal and informal learning contexts, could support advanced musicians’ learning through trial and error, enhance creative insight, strengthen self-efficacy, foster metacognitive skills and nurture individuality.

This paper seeks t o interrogate some of the common uses and assumptions surrounding the musicological concept of tradition and its empirical study from recordings. In particular, I take issue with certain style-analytical approaches for investigating performance traditions from recordings. From a theoretical perspective, I consider how the operation of tradition resides beyond the substantive content of performance style, and how such an understanding of tradition fares against quantitative measurements of style and the historical periodization of performance practice. Through a series of empirical case studies based on two of Crieg's Lyric Pieces I investigate the relevance of tradition as an analytical category for studying the transmission of performance practices from recordings. Using beat tempo data extracted from these recordings as an empirical marker of transmission processes, the case studies illustrate how stylistic kinship between performers captures the operation of tradition in different contexts. Findings suggest that stylistic relationships function best as heuristic tools for tracing the presence of tradition in this repertoire: the data do not support the more conventional understanding of tradition as collective style or historically patterned trend, nor do stylistic similarities between performers always verify the operation of tradition. Finally, in seeking to understand tradition beyond the dimension of performance style, I turn to ethnographic data which reveal the operation of tradition as a subjective feeling of connection and ultimately as ontological potential.