The historically informed performance movement, which gained momentum from the 1970s onward, sought to recover performance practices contemporary with a work's composition, using period instruments, historical bowing and articulation techniques, and tempos and ornamentation reconstructed from treatises and manuscript markings, in place of the performance conventions that had accumulated in the intervening centuries. Advocates presented this approach as a form of restoration, stripping away layers of romantic-era interpretive habit, wider vibrato, larger ensembles, freer tempo rubato, to reveal a work closer to what its composer had actually heard. Critics of the movement, including some historically informed performers themselves, have pointed out a difficulty this restoration framing tends to obscure: the surviving evidence for period practice is itself fragmentary and often contradictory, so that a given historically informed performance necessarily fills gaps in the documentary record with choices no less interpretive, and no less reflective of the performer's own aesthetic moment, than the romantic-era conventions it replaces. A treatise's tempo indication may admit multiple plausible readings, ornamentation manuscripts frequently disagree with one another, and the surviving instruments themselves were altered by subsequent owners in ways that complicate any claim to hear them as their original makers intended. This difficulty does not mean the historically informed approach yields performances no different from, or no more historically grounded than, romantic-era ones; the movement's research has genuinely narrowed the range of plausible interpretive choices by ruling out conventions demonstrably absent from the historical record. But it does mean that a historically informed performance is better understood as a scholarly and interpretive project operating within a documented range of historical possibility than as a direct, unmediated recovery of how a work originally sounded, a distinction the movement's own promotional language, emphasizing authenticity and restoration, has sometimes tended to blur. Some ensembles have responded by adjusting their program notes accordingly, describing their interpretive choices explicitly as reasoned reconstructions within a documented range of historical possibility rather than as claims to have recovered a composer's original intentions in any unmediated sense.