Music was well represented on the programme of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual meeting held in Denver from 21 to 23 March 2019. Although the papers were organized into panels with titles including ‘Consuming Foreign Music, Theatre, and Dance in Eighteenth-Century England’, ‘Music, Ballet, and Opera and Recent Enlightenment Studies’, ‘Music and Mobility’ (sponsored by the Mozart Society of America) and ‘Multimodal Music’ (sponsored by the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music), the overarching issues that arose across these panels indicated broader trends in interdisciplinary research on eighteenth-century music. ASECS fosters such conversations, and indeed the papers intersected in various thought-provoking ways, particularly on issues of race, gender, class and identity. These themes echoed a broader methodological and critical question raised at the conference, most explicitly in a Digital Humanities and Global History roundtable held in recognition of the society's fiftieth anniversary: how might the content and form of scholarship decentre eighteenth-century historiography?

A keynote lecture by Laurent Dubois (Duke University) touched upon music and brought together concerns about race, gender and class. He argued that theatre scholarship offers a path into eighteenth-century Caribbean thought and politics because plots grappled with virtue and justice, performances enjoyed a popular reach, and librettos were adaptable to various contexts, especially through improvisation. Moreover, theatres represented a site of social struggle, particularly as vernacular music and dance from non-literate classes were infiltrating the stage. He explored this proposal through a gendered lens and – most interesting for musicologists – revealed new archival materials documenting the life of Elisabeth Alexandrine Louise Ferrand, known as Minette, a free woman of colour who sang at the Port-au-Prince Comédie before the Haitian Revolution and who was the protagonist of Marie Vieux-Chauvet's novel Dance on the Volcano (title as translated by Kaiama L. Glover (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2016)). Although Minette was previously believed to have perished during the Revolution, Dubois’ evidence proves that she emigrated to Louisiana, where at least one of her benefit concerts was advertised in newspapers. She probably performed in Baltimore as well. Considering musicianship within the context of theatre and migration in the Caribbean world puts into relief the significant role played by race and gender in eighteenth-century musical life.

Julia Marianne Hamilton (Columbia University) grappled with issues similar to those raised in Dubois’ keynote address. Hamilton analysed the song ‘The Negro's Lamentation’ (1800) through its modes of consumption: reading the song's text, practising at the piano and listening during performance. Because the lyrics articulate the perspective of an enslaved African person, it promoted what Hamilton called ‘racialized thinking’, especially among British women who performed the piece, since the text-setting demanded reflection while practising. This process would have foregrounded British national guilt about participation in a global market dependent upon slavery. Gender and national identity also came together in a paper by Rachel Bani (Florida State University), which explored how Hanoverian musical propaganda, in order to emphasize the threat Jacobitism posed to the cultural status quo and social order, portrayed the Jacobite figure Jenny Cameron (c1698–1722) as a promiscuous feminine power who was nevertheless subordinated by male sexual domination.

In a panel dedicated to ‘Reading the Eighteenth Century in (the) Light of #MeToo’, Catherine Coppola (Hunter College, CUNY) offered a brilliant critique of contemporary engagement with Mozart's women. She pointed out two fallacies often used to excuse treatment of women in Mozart's operas: that the composer did not know any better, and that we, modern audiences, do. Coppola outlined the nascent Enlightenment feminism with which Mozart would have been familiar and also how the problem of Mozart's misogynistic characterizations of women is perpetuated and exacerbated by contemporary production and translation choices. She applied this insight to her suggestion of innovations for music-history pedagogy.

A lecture-recital presented and performed by Kimary Fick (Oregon State University) and Alison DeSimone (University of Missouri–Kansas City) demonstrated how composers Elisabetta de Gambarini and Ana Bon ‘were able to emerge from their limited gendered roles and engage professionally with the amateur musical society through music publication’. The frontispiece of Gambarini's second book of harpsichord music portrays her in the very act of composing – an indication, according to Fick and DeSimone, of her access to a high social milieu. Consequently, her works performed on the programme included a courtly Minuet and Variations in A major, Op. 2, and dance movements based on a salon or parlour song entitled ‘Lover, Go, and Calm Thy Sighs’. In contrast, Ana Bon, a virtuoso who enjoyed little access to elite society, probably composed her Six Sonatas for Flute and Harpsichord, Op. 1, with her patron, Frederick the Great, in mind. Not only did DeSimone (harpsichord) and Fick (baroque flute) perform the pieces with careful attention to matters of performance practice, they also provided the non-specialist audience with a clear and engaging introduction to the historical instruments. Elisa Edwards (Élan Ensemble) and Basil Considine (University of Tennessee–Chattanooga) similarly dealt with the intersection of class and gender through the fascinating trove of new evidence they have discovered illuminating the musical education, scores, instruments and talents of Eliza Ridgely, a Maryland heiress famously depicted in the painting The Lady with a Harp (1818).

Two papers considered how music facilitated the mingling of classes during the eighteenth century. My own paper (Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, University of North Texas) proposed that scholars consider the Enlightenment as a lived experience of musicians rather than a textual phenomenon found in writings about music and in scores. I illustrated my proposal through a case study: the violinist Georges Jacques Devaux and his rise to Masonic esteem in late eighteenth-century Paris. I concluded that musical spaces offered an opportunity for an experience of Enlightenment liberal individualism, even within institutions that subscribed to the Enlightenment's darker side, which prioritized the white male as a universal subject. Ashley Greathouse (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music) also considered how music facilitated exchange among classes, in this case in eighteenth-century England, owing to the ubiquitous presence of music in the daily rhythms of spa towns like Tunbridge Wells.

A number of papers, such as those by Hamilton and Bani discussed above, indicated the significance that British national identity played in musical production and reception throughout the eighteenth century. A constellation of papers seemed to suggest that Handel's popularity weathered stronger competition than typically acknowledged. Alison DeSimone discussed how the songbook miscellany in early eighteenth-century England depicted everyday life. In addition to popular themes like love and sex, she identified themes of country life, imbibing, illness and aging, and finances in the songbooks. Dealing with the quotidian pleasures and struggles of British life, they included very little foreign music. Through a carefully designed statistical study of subscription lists in eighteenth-century England, Joseph Darby (Keene State College) also showed some surprising and important trends in British music consumption. First, from the 1730s onward, music sales indicated a strong preference for native-born composers. Women outsold their male counterparts, and, perhaps less surprisingly, women were increasingly the consumers of subscription music. Erica Levenson (SUNY Potsdam) revealed how French comic opera received a multifarious reception in early eighteenth-century London, but was certainly more popular, particularly among royalty, than previously acknowledged. The theme of nationalistic disdain for the music of one nation by another was reflected in a different vein by Michael Vincent (University of Florida) in his paper ‘“He knew no music other than his own”: Boccherini, the Black Legend, and Continental Cosmopolitanism’, which showed how the Black Legend was adopted within some historiography to cast Spanish music style as inferior.

Both Hedy Law (University of British Columbia) and Julia Doe (Columbia University) corrected trends in French music scholarship. Law identified a disconnect between recent Enlightenment studies and musicology; her paper rectified this trend by detailing how Rameau librettist Louis de Cahusac adopted the framework from the third volume of the Abbé Dubos's Reflixions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1733) to argue that pantomime in fact expressed moral freedom. Doe shed light on a longstanding misconception in music historiography. Through a case study of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry's Richard Coeur de Lion (1784) she argued that opéra-comique's Enlightenment associations as a genre of the popular classes were in fact largely constructed through developments in nineteenth-century French politics. In response to these papers, Ed Goehring (Western University) raised two salient issues: first, the compelling way that art also resisted political inscription through its malleability, and second, the possibility of tracing an Enlightenment poetics.

Media provided another productive way into eighteenth-century music studies. Stephen Armstrong (Eastman School of Music) discussed how wealthy music patron William Beckford recreated in his home a multimedia experience incorporating castrato performances to engage in a kind of ‘virtual tourism’ that reanimated his splendid voyages in Italy. Sarah Weston (Yale University) offered a fascinating paper at the intersection of English literature and art history to consider how details from William Blake's oeuvre suggest that he drew from personal musical experiences to create his famous engravings and poetry. Considering evidence from the musicality of his poetics to the layout of images on his pages, and even Blake's printing process, Weston proposed that singing, concert venues and musical texts imbued Blake's compositional process and products. Caitlin Truelove (University of Cincinnati) demonstrated that the soundtrack to the drama series Outlander faithfully depicts eighteenth-century Scotland in an effort to create a ‘believable, immersive world for viewers’, in part owing to composer Bear McCreary's interest in historically informed compositional practices. Finally, Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University) presented a compelling new methodological approach to musicological research. To avoid assumptions about what prompted operatic fame, Joubert and her research team have formed a data model grounded in Bruno Latour's actor-network theory to show how a canon forms as a result of the interrelated chains of aesthetic assessments necessarily grounded in material conditions of performance.

Overall, the musical discussions at ASECS exposed promising new trends in eighteenth-century music scholarship and the valuable contribution that music offers to interdisciplinary work on the century as a whole.