This festival-conference inaugurated the new baroque organ in Cornell's Anabel Taylor Chapel, the latest addition to a campus already rich in historical keyboard instruments, but hitherto lacking a large organ suitable for repertories from before 1850. The event brought an international group of organ experts – organists and organ builders – in contact with historians of eighteenth-century music; these groups seldom meet otherwise, except in the persons of the event's organizers, Annette Richards and David Yearsley (both of Cornell University). In an opening ceremony, the two briefed an international group of participants on details of the instrument now towering over them.

The organ is a ‘fantasy reconstruction’ of Arp Schnitger's 1706 instrument for the Charlottenburg palace in Berlin. The fantasy part is that many decisions had to be based on technical documentation, recordings and comparable organs rather than the original, which was destroyed in World War II. Moreover, the loft of Anabel Taylor Chapel obviated the need for some peculiarities of the Charlottenburg organ's case and disposition – it was built into a space never designed to contain an organ – hence the choice of a more standard Schnitger case (modelled on that in Zellerfeld) and a few extra stops. Apart from these liberties, master organ builder Munetaka Yokota, his colleagues at the Göteborg Organ Arts Centre (GOArt) and upstate New York craftspeople relied solely on techniques and materials available to Schnitger.

Following the welcome notes, the subject of eighteenth-century German keyboard culture was introduced in deed rather than words by Mike Lee (Cornell University), who spanned the century by playing J. S. Bach's Partita No. 4 on a replica of a piano from Mozart's time. Hearing Bach but merely seeing the new organ must have greatly raised the level of suspense among the assembled organists.

Laurenz Lütteken (Universität Zürich) gave the keynote address, entitled ‘Variety, Synthesis and Supremacy: Aspects of a Musical Topography in the Berlin of Frederick II’. The map suggested in the title was neither complete nor simplified; rather, Lütteken drew up coordinates between the poles of bourgeois and court culture, Italian and French styles, instrumental and vocal music, and harmony and melody; he then provided sketches of the places to which speakers at the conference would return time and again, and located some of the next two days' protagonists, such as Carl Heinrich Graun, Johann Friedrich Agricola, Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, Anna Amalia von Preußen and others. After dinner Jacques van Oortmerssen (Conservatorium van Amsterdam) presented an all J. S. Bach recital.

Darrell M. Berg (St Louis) opened by surveying facts concerning ‘The State of Music in Mid Eighteenth-Century Berlin’. She reminded the audience of Dresden's electoral court as an important model for Berlin, but also of factors that distinguished Berlin, such as its various private musical associations and the explosion of music criticism following 1750. F. W. Marpurg was given centre stage by Mathieu Langlois (Cornell University). Langlois argued that ‘Monsieur Marpourg's’ character pieces, published in Paris before his move to Berlin in 1748, amounted to more than a German imitation of a French genre. He then lingered on the role of these pieces in Marpurg's subsequent debate with Agricola and the light they cast on conceptions of nature and art, French and Italian music, and vocal and instrumental genres in mid-century Berlin. Kerala Snyder (Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester) concluded the session by introducing what would become a central theme of the conference: the role of Berlin musicians, especially students and ‘grand-students’ of J. S. Bach, as preservers of early music. She pointed to the large overlap of repertory in a collection of manuscripts in Agricola's hand and the music that the young Bach studied (according to his obituary, co-authored by Agricola). Snyder also addressed the role of Frederick's sister Anna Amalia, whose library held one of the most significant collections of early music at the time. The paper thus served as an introductory talk to the following recital by Annette Richards, entitled ‘The Princess Anna Amalia at the Organ’. This fine performance, made up of compositions from Anna Amalia's library, was my first chance to listen to and admire the excellent new instrument, whose sound is on a par with that of the restored Schnitger originals I have heard in Groningen, Norden and Hamburg. The acoustic of Anabel Taylor Chapel seemed drier than before, perhaps because of the organ case, perhaps the consistently large audiences; as a result, all nuances of articulation reached the audience relatively unmediated by reverberation.

After this recital Ellen Exner (Harvard University) opened the afternoon session with a paper on the J. S. Bach tradition in eighteenth-century Berlin. Exner interpreted the growing interest in the composer, facilitated by the multitude of descendants and students active in Berlin, as a musical component of the Prussian state's historical self-invention.

Marpurg made his final appearance in the paper of your reporter (Martin Küster, Cornell University). I related the theorist's vision of an unchanging, deterministic harmonization of hymn melodies to the mutually dependent ideals, shared by theorists on both sides of the harmony vs melody debate, of harmonically unambiguous melody, ‘natural’ harmonization and dispensable accompaniment. David Schulenberg (Wagner College) investigated Wilhelm Friedemann's contribution to the Berlin Bach tradition after he took up residence there in 1774, taking into account his role both as a custodian of manuscripts and as a performer and composer connected with prominent Bachians such as Anna Amalia, J. N. Forkel and C. F. Zelter. Richard Kramer (City University of New York) resumed a long-standing discussion surrounding bar 27 of C. P. E. Bach's Sonata in F minor, Wq57/6. The passage – an unexpected chord preceded by a surprisingly long rest – has a reception history of bewilderment, opposition, defence and recomposition involving Forkel, Bülow, Riemann and Schenker. Kramer summarized and refuted these earlier theorists' approaches while suggesting an updated reading involving greater attention to issues of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘narrativity’.

In the afternoon Andrew Willis (University of North Carolina, Greensboro) played a recital of mid-century compositions connected with Berlin and the Bach family, including, alongside father and sons, such outstanding (yet rarely played) composers as Johann Gottfried Müthel and Georg Benda. His instrument, another fantasy reconstruction (now of a c1735 Florentine piano) served as the closest available approximation of the Silbermann that J. S. Bach probably played at Potsdam. Willis's masterful sense of timing and the delicacy of the instrument held the audience in a profound, attentive silence.

The evening's chamber music recital featured works by J. S. and C. P. E. Bach, Frederick II, the brothers Graun, Krebs, Telemann and Zachary Wadsworth (Cornell University), whose Recitative and Aria was composed for the occasion. While this contemporary piece was highlighted as ‘proof of the expansive adaptability of the instrument’, the same could be said of the composer, who met the organ's baroque idiom more than half-way. In this recital the new instrument's astonishing suitability for chamber music was on display. David Yearsley's playing on the organ's flute stops and Steven Zohn's (Temple University) on the transverse flute often blended to the extent of being indistinguishable; and at no occasion did the organ drown out Kristen Dubenion-Smith's (Baltimore) mezzo soprano.

Ulrich Leisinger (Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg) opened Saturday morning's paper session with a semi-humorous take on Mozart's journey to Dresden and Berlin in 1789, about which so little is known that it has long invited speculation and falsification. He advanced the tongue-in-cheek hypothesis that Mozart tried to ‘meet Bach’, leaving it open which Bach was meant. Next Matthew Head (King's College London) read Mozart's Rondo in A minor, k511, through the lens of ‘aesthetic terror’, holding it up against discussions of the Gothic in the writings of Sulzer, Goethe and Reichardt. Some of the claims he made provoked spirited reactions from the audience: while some suspected that a fantastic rondo tradition, deriving from C. P. E Bach, may have informed the piece, others questioned whether Mozart's written-out ornamentation was indeed as excessive as suggested; yet others questioned the applicability of North German aesthetics to the Viennese Mozart.

After lunch, Jean Ferrard (Brussels) played a selection of European music published in ‘The Roaring Twenties of the Seventeenth Century’, giving a lucid idea of what such early music might have sounded like a hundred years later. Your reporter, doubling as stop-puller and page-turner for the night's inauguration concert, could not be present at the final paper session, which included the chemist Catherine Oertel (Oberlin College), instrument-builder Joel Speerstra (Göteborg), cabinet maker Christopher Lowe (Freeville, New York), organ builder Peter Geise (Parsons Pipe Organ Builders, Canandaigua, New York) and organ researcher Paul Peeters (GOArt). Oertel presented her work on lead-tin alloys and organ pipe corrosion while Speerstra lectured on the pigment known as Prussian Blue. He reportedly stressed the colour's durability, thus squarely and unwittingly contradicting Sebastian Bach, whose line ‘it's Prussian Blue; it fades’ was meant to belittle his son Emanuel's music; thus the conference was proof that Bach erred in both senses.

Hissing, hammering and an enormous tone cluster that threatened to deplete the organ's wind supply (manually provided by Calcanten, or organ-blowers) opened Anacrusis, a ten-minute electroacoustic piece by Kevin Ernste (Cornell), which headed the inauguration recital. Then, after a few words of introduction by Cornell and Gothenburg dignitaries, North German organ legend Harald Vogel (Hochschule für Künste Bremen) played music spanning from Sweelinck to C. P. E. Bach.

The conference, covering approaches from biography to hermeneutics, from text-criticism to analysis, cultural studies to the history of music theory, reflected the wide scope of contemporary studies in eighteenth-century German music; in so far as the papers were representative, they gave the impression of a subdiscipline in flux. There remained some of the traditional attention to the ‘peaks’ of J. S. Bach and Mozart, but little of the old preoccupation with their connection, which formerly made the rest of the century either transitional or marginal. Meanwhile, new questions were emerging concerning the interactions between Vienna and Berlin, the consistency of mid-century musical cultures, the role of the Berlin style in the formulation of music theories and the ‘unclassical’ elements of the ‘classical style’. And even while all this scholarly attention was turned on the Berlin of Frederick II, the organ itself, a monument to the lavish musical patronage under Frederick I, was a reminder that there is yet more to be discovered even in eighteenth-century German music.