The Schola Cantorum's Corelli symposium, held to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the composer's death, happened to be the second Corelli conference in as many weeks (see the report in this journal on Arcomelo 2013), and yet it gathered a refreshing and illuminating array of scholarly perspectives in six paper sessions, one roundtable and one dance demonstration. The two papers that initiated the conference offered the broadest perspectives of Corelli's social environment: Renata Ago (Università di Roma La Sapienza) presented a detailed overview of the patronage of artist-immigrants such as Corelli, with a careful look at how the stable ecclesiastical aristocracy in Rome, albeit with frequently changing papacies, created the city's favourable artistic climate, and Andrew Hopkins (Università dell'Aquila) illustrated how seventeenth-century architects worked from sixteenth-century exemplars and thus put visible examples of creatively reworked models before the Roman public, Corelli included.

The two papers that followed continued the focus on artistic models, but now honing in on Corelli's own efforts. Agnese Pavanello (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) argued that the evidence of Corelli's patronage, his work as orchestra leader and revisions he made to his compositions show his purposeful cultivation of an exemplary style in the service of Roman ecclesiastical politics and ideology. Alberto Sanna (Liverpool Hope University) proposed a revisionist view of Corelli's music, countering the nineteenth-century historiographical tradition that sees him as a locus classicus of harmony and counterpoint. Sanna instead proposed studying Corelli in terms of aesthetic principles that can be gleaned from Italian treatises that Corelli knew or whose authors – Berardi, Liberati and Pitoni – he would have known. Although speaking the following day, Antonella D'Ovidio (Università di Firenze) pursued, like Pavanello, a deeply contextualized view of Corelli's musical style. In this case, D'Ovidio raised the possibility of an Ottobonian style of sonata, one created specifically for the cardinal's musical academies, as advertised in the Op. 4 sonatas, and distinct from Corelli's other published works.

The interests and methods of the next three papers turned to compositional technique and analysis. Beginning with Johann Mattheson's description of Corelli's harmonic style in the context of dissonance treatment, Johannes Menke (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) systematically demonstrated the uses that Corelli made of ninths both in chord progressions and in individual harmonies. The result was a clear understanding of at least one compositional formula that contributed vitally toward Corelli's distinctive idiom. Dominik Sackmann (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste) explored da-capo-like reprises within Corellian movements, fugues in particular, that in his estimation represent a nourishing source of the yet distant sonata form. Nicola Cumer (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis), drawing on the recent surge of scholarship on partimento improvisation and on stock harmonic–melodic patterns in eighteenth-century composition, examined Corelli's music against the possibilities afforded by those techniques to demonstrate how well his compositional choices fitted with them.

More than one session included scholarship on Corelli and historical performance practice. Alexandra Nigito (Basel) collected iconographic, written and musical evidence illustrating the size and performance contexts of Roman musical ensembles during Corelli's time. In addition to confronting these broader questions, Nigito also examined the differing continuo groups and changing use of winds in Corellian ensembles (trombe before c1700; oboi and flauti after). Neal Zaslaw (Cornell University) took his point of departure from recent editions by Christopher Hogwood of eighteenth-century ornaments for Corelli Op. 5 violin sonatas and of keyboard transcriptions of those same sonatas. As Zaslaw pointed out, these editions – which are not a part of the recently completed critical edition of Corelli's music – are themselves incomplete if we are to gain a perspective on the tradition of ornamenting Corelli's Op. 5 as passed along by his students. To illustrate this point, Zaslaw played a recording of Francesco Galeazzi's 1817 ornaments (not included by Hogwood), whose ornamental style sounds distant from Corelli's own, but whose practice represents that of a ‘third-generation Corellian’ (student of a Corelli student).

The presentation by Alessandro Palmeri (Verbania) featured a Roman violone from Corelli's time that demonstrates – as does the Stradivarius ‘Servais’ cello in the American Smithsonian Collection – both the large size of a late seventeenth-century violin-family bass and its dark, lustrous sound. My paper (Gregory Barnett, Rice University) drew upon iconographic and musical evidence, first, to exclude the violoncello da spalla from from the types of bass violins typically played in Rome, and second, to illustrate the instrument's usual playing position and performing techniques in Corelli's time. A paper by Jesper Christensen (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) on keyboard continuo accompaniment drew upon evidence in sources from Lorenzo Penna (1672) to Francesco Geminiani (1746), but especially the anonymous manuscript I-Bc, MS E.25 (c1680), to argue for fuller and more dissonant realizations that not only employ harmonies beyond those implied in the figures, but also add occasional stretto passages against Corelli's notated melodies. Clive Brown (University of Leeds) explored the nexus between historical performance practice and reception history with a survey of nineteenth-century opinions, performances and editions of Corelli's music. Guido Olivieri (The University of Texas, Austin) focused on the possibility of Corelli's immediate influence on the already flourishing Neapolitan school of violin playing by examining sonatas of Pietro Marchitelli, Giovanni Antonio Avitrano, Giovanni Antonio Guido and Michele Mascitti. His findings suggest a dichotomy between a persistent local tradition preserved in manuscript and a Corelli-influenced ‘international’ style in prints.

Apart from single-author papers, a demonstration led by Barbara Leitherer (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) of Feuillet-notated choreography to the music of Corelli yielded varying results, showing that Corelli was receptive to French influence but not bound to it, and a roundtable on the problem of Corelli attributions brought forth the authentication of a few pieces currently in the appendix to the critical edition of his music (Pavanello), a set of chamber sonatas attributed to Corelli in an Assisi manuscript (Olivieri) and a potential method of stylistic authentication by considering the appearance (or contradiction) of well-established Corellian formulas of harmony and melody (Cumer). The conference also included three concerts: one of music for the Christmas season, featuring Corelli's Op. 6 No. 8 (‘Fatto per la notte di Natale’) as an introduction to Giovanni Lulier's oratorio Per la nascita del Redentore (1698), performed by students and faculty of the Schola Cantorum under the direction of Rinaldo Alessandrini; another of the Op. 5 violin sonatas (Amandine Beyer, violin; Jesper Christiansen, harpsichord); and a third of pieces drawn entirely from the appendix to the Corelli edition, performed by students of the Schola Cantorum.

This conference and the one held a week earlier in Fusignano (Corelli's birthplace) revealed a few points of general interest and agreement among those who participated. Above all, a consensus emerged at both symposia that the canon of authenticated works – and therefore the critical edition of Corelli – needs revising. Both conferences also stressed the desire for a more broadly contextualized study of Corelli's music vis-à-vis Roman ecclesiastical patronage and its rituals of entertainments, church services and cultural displays. Finally, continuo players – mostly keyboardists, but also lutenists – all favour a more active and freer style of accompaniment than is typically heard today, and they continue to mine both printed and manuscript sources for clues as to what was possible in Corelli's time.