One of the first objectives of Early Music was to allow scholarship to inform performance. More than any other journal or medium, this it has done. Performers of early repertories lapped up what was served to them about rhythm, articulation, instrument design, tuning, pitch, singing styles, ornamentation etc., and zealously rendered all these things into the style, which has now been largely discredited, or rather subsumed into the mainstream. To the great credit of the successive editors of this journal, the process of taming the dogma was carried out in these very pages, in many cases by allowing performance to inform scholarship. As a reformed zealot who moved largely from scholarship to performance, from adducing documentary evidence for 17th- and 18th-century performance practice to helping devise the early music course at the Royal Academy of Music, here is what I think happened. The great shift was driven by market forces or, to be more precise, by students and aspiring young professionals. At most major conservatoires, early music was until shortly before the turn of the last century a ghetto subject—not exactly a refuge for weaker musicians, rather something positively discouraged by famous and powerful mainstream professors. But their high-flying students, busily practising concertos they would never play with an orchestra, began to notice that their less glamorous classmates were getting stimulating work in period bands. To the credit of John Wallace and the late James Watson, the change first gathered pace at the Academy in the brass department: all students were required to learn to play natural trumpets, valveless horns and sackbuts, which was heard to have a positive effect on their modern instrument tone and technique. String students soon followed, first by learning to use Baroque and early Classical bows, freeing up the right wrist which is particularly beneficial for cellists, and later having access to fine, unmodernized instruments from the Academy’s own stock and from the Beckett Collection.