In his chapter, ‘From Score to Sound’, Peter Hill points out:

Although Hill's comment is a statement of the obvious, the notion is deeply embedded in the unconscious minds of many present-day performers. Arguably, it is so as another by-product of the modernist paradigm. Since the nineteenth century a key theme of musicology has been creation of ‘definitive’ notational texts, linked to the aspiration for ‘composer-faithful’ playing – a matter that acts of course in seamless continuum with the ‘historical performance’ project. Often as the only immediately tangible evidence of the composer's intentions, ‘the score’ has developed an almost mythical property. Yet, as is equally elementary, music is indeed an ‘imagined’ construct, ceasing to exist in any meaningful form without the agency of performance itself, and, for the non-musically literate, this is an axiomatic point. Even though learned societies in the nineteenth century (such as John Ella's Musical Union) anticipated a later abstract conceptualisation of ‘the music’ beyond performance itself, it is unlikely that this was a prevailing view at the time.

It is obvious, too, that the project to acquire and understand historical performing practices is bound up with semiotics. This being so, ‘the score’ is the most potent tool for historical performance, certainly in epochs before the twentieth century. It is only in the study of recorded performances, which will be considered in the next chapter, that some semblances of sounded reality exist to be discovered. This source of direct evidence, of course, is one of the principal determinants of difference between (late) nineteenth- and early twentieth-century performing practices, and all prior history. The difference is a profound one and, I would argue, one of the main reasons why romantic performance stands at a crossroads of intentionality – with all the attendant crossfire of opinions this entails.