Principes is the best known and most influential of the three, as the flute treatise (which occupies 34 of the 52 pages of text) was the first set of instructions ever published specifically for the transverse flute. Principes de la flûte-traversière (1707),.Of particular importance to the present study are his three didactic treatises:
Happily, much of the relevant source material relating to these activities has survived. Jacques Hotteterre le romain (1674–1763) was a composer, theorist, teacher, performer and instrument maker. And for this purpose original instruments, historical treatises, and all the rest have proven their value.’ Jacques Hotteterre le romain Nevertheless Taruskin sees value for the modern musician in the study of historical evidence: ‘Really talented performers are always curious, and curious performers will always find what they need in the sources and theorists-what they need being ways of enriching and enlivening what they do.’ ‘It is not the elimination of personal choice from performance that real artists desire, but its improvement and refreshment. Richard Taruskin is ‘convinced that ‘historical’ performance today is not really historical that a thin veneer of historicism clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time, and is in fact the most modem style around.’ Laurence Dreyfus believes that, by itself, this empiricist methodology is unhelpful in the study of performance practice, and that a new approach should acknowledge that ‘historical performance… an evolving and necessarily incomplete paradigm rather than a set of documented index cards set atop inferences culled from freshman logic texts’. This approach was aimed at providing the ‘scientific’ support for a ‘code of performance’ of universal applicability ‘into which the score need only be plugged to set the music aglow with authenticity’. A number of authors are critical of the ‘positivist’ or ‘objectivist’ goal of amassing more and more facts. During the 1980s, numerous writings appeared which looked critically at the state of research into what has been termed historical performance practice.