In demythologizing the scholarly rhetoric of (so-called) historical performance, Taruskin has placed performance style at the centre of music history; never again, perhaps, will it be possible to publish a ‘history of twentieth-century music’ that considers only twentieth- century composition, ignoring twentieth-century performance. And other recent initiatives in the study of performance are tending in the same direction: techniques borrowed from experimental psychology are enabling musicologists and theorists to study recorded performances in much the same sense that they have up to now studied scores, so helping to rectify the unbalanced approach that I have repeatedly complained about in this book. This is one way in which the poor fit between music and musicology diagnosed by Kerman is being addressed. But when he called for musicologists to transcend their positivism and engage critically with music – when he called, as he put it, for a ‘musicology oriented towards criticism’ – Kerman had something else in mind.