The conference began as most do, with a cluster of scholars in the lobby of a university building fussily pinning name tags on and peering into totebags filled with conference booklets and flyers. But when I stepped through a doorway at the top of the stairs into a set of large galleries crowded with keyboards – harpsichords, virginals, spinets, fortepianos, square pianos, organs, a claviorgan and several pianinos, not to mention an entire wall of clavichords – I was at once overwhelmed by the richness and diversity of instruments, techniques, repertoires and contexts that fall under the generic rubric of ‘historical keyboard music’. This inaugural event of the conference, a tour of the keyboard collections at St Cecilia Hall, University of Edinburgh – which include the Raymond Russell Collection of Early Keyboard Instruments and the Rodger Mirrey Collection of Early Keyboard Instruments – was a fitting opening for the first ever ‘International Conference on Historical Keyboard Music’. The conference itself boasted a rich offering of papers, lecture-recitals and performances spanning the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and approaches from the organological to the theoretical.
Organizers Andrew Woolley, Erasmo Estrada, Eleanor Smith and John Kitchen (all University of Edinburgh) gamely organized this diversity into three parallel sessions running the two days of the conference. A number of panels focused on the keyboard-rich eighteenth century, but the overlapping sessions sometimes prevented the enthusiast of eighteenth-century music, namely the reviewer herself, from attending all of the conference's offerings. The descriptions below include both the papers I attended and those I wished to have attended.
The first full day of the conference began with three (!) parallel sessions on eighteenth-century topics: eighteenth-century organs and carillons, Viennese keyboard instruments and Iberian keyboard music. In the first of these sessions Peter Strauven (Université Catholique de Louvain) argued that, contrary to received wisdom, recently discovered manuscripts of organ music from the Southern Netherlands reveal a lively organ culture, while Carl Van Eyndhoven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) offered a survey of carillon performance practice and repertoire from the Low Countries by studying, in part, ‘recordings’ of a kind made for automatic playing systems. After a turn to early nineteenth-century Portuguese organs and their repertoire (by João Vaz, Centro de Investigação Ciência e Tecnologia das Artes/Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa), Sarah Davies (New York University) discussed the English career of German organ builder Johann Schnetzler and the conflicting yet increasingly open-minded attitudes of the time towards organs and their music in the Anglican church following the iconoclasm of the Reformation.
In a parallel session on Viennese keyboard instruments, Luk Vaes (Orpheus Instituut) deduced characteristics of Haydn's intended instruments by examining the technical demands of octave glissandos in the Trio hXV:27. Less conventional instruments were the subject of Robin Blanton's (Göteborgs Universitet) paper, which explored publicity for the experimental keyboard instruments of Johann Andreas Stein and their close ties to Vienna's middle-class Liebhaber.
In the panel on Iberian music, João Pedro d'Alvarenga (Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical / Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and Vanda de Sá (Universidade de Évora) explored technique and style with papers on Carlos Seixas's Keyboard Concerto in G minor and on the influence of the guitar as a popular domestic instrument on keyboard repertoire from the late eighteenth century. On a later panel that morning, Mário Marques Trilha (Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical/Universidade de Lisboa) offered an introduction to little-known Portuguese composer João Cordeiro da Silva, a contemporary of Seixas's, who cultivated a galant style for Italophile Portuguese players. Needless to say, the first several hours of the conference proved both fascinating and frustrating on account of the great variety of simultaneous papers.
In the afternoon, while many panels turned to earlier repertoire, Tibor Szász (Staatliche Hochschule für Musik Freiburg) presented a lecture-recital exploring the cognitive threads that link the diverse episodes of Mozart's Fantasy and Sonata k475/457, in an ‘il filo’-style analysis based on Leopold Mozart's demand that a good composition should possess ‘der gute Satz, und die Ordnung, il filo’ (good technical composition and arrangement of material: the thread) (The Letters of Mozart and His Family, trans. Emily Anderson (London: Macmillan, 1938), volume 2, 889, letter L. 323, 13 August 1778). Another lecture-recital by Kris Worsley (Royal Northern College of Music) explored connections between teacher Christian Gottlob Neefe and pupil Ludwig van Beethoven through the lens of their variations on themes by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf. Graham Sadler (University of Hull) followed new evidence of Domenico Scarlatti's 1724 and 1725 visits to Paris with a tantalizing suggestion of mutual influence between Scarlatti and Jean Philippe Rameau based on keyboard techniques and melodies shared by the former's sonatas and latter's pièces.
The afternoon ended with two events with a shared theme, namely restoring the Bach sons to the attention of scholars and listeners, if not to the high status they held in the esteem of eighteenth-century Kenner und Liebhaber. A keynote lecture on Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach by Susan Wollenberg (University of Oxford) in many ways continued the project of her 1988 article on ‘Changing Views of C. P. E. Bach’ (Music & Letters 69/4 (1988), 461–464). She effectively complicated received attitudes towards the composer by exploring the supposed binaries of Empfindsamkeit and galant, binary form and sonata form, father and son, Bach and Mozart, and Kenner und Liebhaber through the lens of Bach's published keyboard music, to describe how the composer himself shifted deftly between these poles, and thus how modern perceptions continue to shift between them as well. A recital by Robert Hill (Staatliche Hochschule für Musik Freiburg) followed, featuring a programme of rarely heard works by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, including a rich and challenging set of twelve polonaises that demonstrated the wide range of the composer's style.
Despite Wollenberg's deft dismissal of the perceived binary of Bach the father and Bach the son, parallel Sunday morning sessions pitted them against one another yet again. In a panel on literary sensibility in keyboard music, my paper (Sara Gross Ceballos, Lawrence University) offered a ‘novelistic’ reading of C. P. E. Bach's violin–keyboard arrangement of the Fantasia in F sharp minor, C. P. E. Bachs Empfindungen, by casting the accompanying violin as sympathetic reader of Bach's sentimental novel in musical score. Meanwhile, in a panel on notation, Yo Tomita (The Queen's University of Belfast) offered a new reading of J. S. Bach's autograph manuscripts that deciphers performance indications from calligraphic gestures. Beth Pei-Fen Chen (Manchester) followed Tomita with a discussion of how and why to perform unusual double slurs in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's keyboard music. A lecture-recital by John Irving (Canterbury Christ Church University) continued with Mozart, summarizing the many complexities of recording Mozart on the Johann Adolf Hass 1763 clavichord (Russell Collection, St Cecilia's).
In afternoon sessions a paper by Samantha Carrasco (University of Southampton), delivered in absentia, explored the overlap between public concerts in late eighteenth-century Hampshire and music in the private collection of Jane Austen's family. Colleague Penelope Cave (University of Southampton) followed by demonstrating how the taste and musical practice of a single female amateur, Lydia Hoare, shaped instrument production and repertoire in early nineteenth-century England. In another session Mario Anschauer (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften) delivered a lecture-recital on early eighteenth-century Viennese manuscripts containing transcriptions from Lully and Charles Dieupart that indicate a lively interest in French theatrical and keyboard music in the Habsburg capital. Jane Clark (London) followed with a lecture-recital on Couperin, in which she linked the titles of several works to the world of contemporary theatre and court life and explored how one might interpret these musical characterizations at the harpsichord. Joyce Lindorff (Temple University) continued the discussion of performance in a lecture-recital on the practice of legato and its acoustical physics in keyboard works by Nicolo Pasquali and his Art of Fingering.
Following Terence Charleston's (Royal College of Music) fascinating recital and lecture on assembled suites in late seventeenth-century England came the last event of the conference, a panel discussion on the question ‘How viable is it to see keyboard studies as a field in its own right?’. John Butt (University of Glasgow), Robert Hill, Andrew Woolley, John Irving, John Koster (University of South Dakota) and Susan Wollenberg variously examined the benefits of honing in on the keyboard and of fostering collaborations between builders, performers and scholars, while also being aware that this could lead to a certain isolation (‘navel-gazing’). They also considered how one might encourage in students the kind of scholarship and performance demonstrated at the conference.
While neither the panel nor the audience reached any firm conclusions as to the viability of discrete study, ‘discrete’ hardly seems the right word, given the kinds of connections explored and developed by this academic gathering. The conference most effectively brought together a breadth of approaches to the keyboard, including organology, source study, analysis and interpretation, and most especially performance. Many, if not most, conferences focus nearly exclusively on scholarship delivered in twenty- to thirty-minute oral papers, relegating actual music-making, in the form of recitals and lecture-recitals, to what are often poorly attended noon-time or evening sessions. Although the practice of incorporating lecture-recitals into sessions did at times lead to scheduling difficulties and hindered the ability to jump between parallel sessions, these negatives were far outweighed by the positive benefit of making no distinction between the conventional scholarly paper and the lecture-recital. Nor were full recitals, such as those given by Terence Charleston, Robert Hill and John Kitchen, in any way separated from the conference as a whole, and these were as edifying and compelling as the most penetrating papers and lecture-recitals. I sincerely hope that two years from now I can report on the same unity of scholarship and practice at the Second International Conference on Historical Keyboard Music.
