Edited sentence: " (Interpreting Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Yale 1984).Equally skeptical was the harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, himself one of the great pioneers (in company with the builder Frank Hubbard) of the authentic harpsichord's revival.The abdication of esthetic values and artistic responsibilities can confer a certain illusion of simplicity on what the passage of history has presented to us, bleached as white as bones on the sands of time.Though championing the need (for example in his editorship of Scarlatti sonatas) for a thoroughly-informed approach, not least in understanding as fully as possible a composer's actual wishes and intentions in their historical context, he found it necessary to write "too often historical authenticity can be used as a means of escape from any potentially disquieting observance of esthetic values, and from the assumption of any genuine artistic responsibility