Nowadays historical performance is accepted within the academy; you can study baroque oboe at many conservatories, and the fact that you can hear both ‘historical’ and ‘unhistorical’ performances of Bach or Mozart has become a fact of life in a pluralistic culture where different musical traditions run side by side. But the transformation was not achieved without a struggle, and the ‘authenticity’ debate which raged throughout the 1980s was the most lively, not to say vitriolic, in the recent history of either musicology or performance. As a slogan, ‘authenticity’ neatly combined two things. On the one hand, the claim was that performance on the appropriate period instruments, based on the performance practices codified in historical treatises, was ‘authentic’ in the sense of being historically correct. On the other, the term ‘authenticity’ brought into play all those positive connotations I talked about in the first chapter of this book – the idea of being sincere, genuine, true to yourself. In this way, if you played Bach on the piano – if your performance wasn’t ‘authentic’ – then you weren’t simply wrong in a scholarly sense: you were wrong in a moral sense too. You were tarred with the same brush as the Monkees.