A well-known phenomenon in research disciplines, is that as practitioners age and cease to contribute to leading-edge advances, they often turn their interest to the history of their respective disciplines. Thus retired physicists take an interest in the history of physics. Inactive neurologists begin reading the history of neurology. Past-their-prime mathematicians dabble in the history of mathematics. The uncharitable interpretation of the recent rise in popularity of the history of theory, is that theorists have abandoned the active quest to understand music. Although the history of theory is clearly of scholarly importance, we must not forget that the primary task of music theory is to understand music, not music theorists.