Many involved with performance on historical instruments may now find Bilson's remarks extreme; the rhetoric of historicist performance has become progressively milder since the early 1980s. Yet something of Bilson's sense is probably still harboured by any of us who choose the old instruments over modern ones; why, after all, make this choice if one does not believe that there is some positive advantage? Bilson's famous remark may thus still represent a reductio, however much ad absurdum, of the historicist enterprise. Moreover, the same type of thinking is evident in reconstructionist approaches to other arts, such as the Globe Theatre project.