It is now over a quarter of a century since Richard Taruskin spearheaded what George Kennaway has described as the ‘anguished’ debate over so-called authenticity. As he opines, much of this debate ‘now looks like the over-earnest attacking of straw men’. Certainly, the central tenets of Taruskin's criticism seem pretty much self-evident today. John Butt offers a useful summary:

There is certainly significant evidence proposing the existence of a ‘modernist’ agenda in the first years of the twentieth century, with ramifications not only for music composition (a point almost too obvious to utter), but also for aesthetics, the perceived role of the performer, and, ipso facto, what the performer's activity comprises when ‘interpreting’ a historical work. That the Early Music movement has gained in strength is, I think, not disputed. Whilst it would be wrong to suggest that the ‘authenticity debate’ of the 1980s was the first, or indeed the only, questioning of the notion of ‘historical performance’, it does perhaps represent the most major upset to the activity aside from voices of dissent from members of an unapologetic ‘mainstream’.

Today a live-and-let-live atmosphere prevails in the context of present-day inclusive relativism. No longer is one likely to encounter eighteenth-century music ‘as the composer heard it’, as Clive Brown recalled when looking in the window of Blackwell's in Oxford in 1990. Indeed, it is often difficult to spot whether a performance purports to be ‘historical’ as such, or not. Many discs I have reviewed in the last few years require a bit of forensic investigation of sleeve-note photographs and the like to reveal, for example, the use of gutstrung violins when the tone and timbre can be hard to pinpoint after the influence of recording engineers.