 In music, what knowledge do I produce and what responsibility do I take for it? How can we regard historical music research as an ongoing activity rather than a standardised process with the following results? If we represent a field of study by several small stones held in our hands, then as researchers we throw them up in the air as we seek to analyse, deconstruct and compartmentalise. Now when the stones ultimately fall back to the ground, we are not able to catch them all as they have spread in the air and we must decide which stones to catch. These decisions are what interest me because they occur not only with the individual scholar and musician but repeatedly among vast groups of scholars and musicians to form entire fields of study. Through time these decisions can become more or less autonomic and perhaps even unconscious. I promote a shift from a representational to a performative perspective. By reexamining the established practices within historical music performance and theory from a new perspective and asking essential questions relating to their assumed agendas, worldviews and habits, I emphasise historical music performance and musicology as social activities where the one is causing the other. This opens for historical musicology and music performance studies to be seen differently from a range of perspectives which may contribute to change the way in which we understand and utilise historical music as artefacts, practises, social potential and entities. Furthermore, we can change how we teach and regard the past, understand our present and theorise our musical futures.