WHEN the first issue of Early Music appeared in 1973, its intended readership of ‘listeners, performers and instrument makers … scholars and students’ may well have shared at least one broad understanding: that the recent ground-swell of interest in ‘pre-Classical’ music had been due in no small measure to the efforts of performers (and instrument builders) in learning and adopting earlier practices. Or, to put it another way: that the exploration of earlier performance styles and conventions was not merely of academic value but had opened up something of practical significance, with the capacity to breathe new life into forgotten repertories and familiar masterpieces, and to illuminate what composers themselves may have intended with their music.

By the early 1980s this surge of enthusiastic activity had met with vociferous opposition from certain quarters. The attempt to identify and then emulate the sort of performance a composer may have intended was a naïve and anti-musical goal, neither achievable nor desirable, a fool's errand and a recipe for soulless music-making. A new orthodoxy duly emerged (and still prevails), which runs roughly as follows. Since the musical intentions of long-dead composers remain largely unknowable and may in any case be deemed no longer ‘relevant’, those who nevertheless choose to perform their music bear no real responsibilities toward its composers, only toward themselves and today's audiences: the performer's job (as Richard Taruskin has put it) is simply ‘to discover … how we really like it’.

Amongst the myriad questions that immediately arise are these:

• how unknowable are a composer's intentions?

• in what sense is the notion of a composition separable from the sort(s) of performance envisaged for it by its composer?

• why do we bother with the works of composers whose musical intentions are in large part believed to be no longer relevant?

• given that individual taste varies, does discovering ‘how we really like it’ mean tailoring a composer's work to satisfy any and every taste, or merely popular taste?