On a warm, sunny Thursday in February about sixty eighteenth-century scholars and students gathered from the United States and around the world on the picturesque Stanford University campus for the first-ever joint meeting of the American Bach Society and the Mozart Society of America. The conference was small (twenty-one presentations divided over six sessions), but the scope of enquiry was impressive. A busy four days included formal papers, two specially designed panel sessions, three concerts, meetings for both societies, a tour of Stanford's Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH) Lab, and plenty of opportunities for old friends and new acquaintances alike to exchange ideas and enjoy each other's company. Individual presentations explored questions of social context, reception history and musical form, as well as links between Bach and Mozart. Especially welcome in the design of the programme was its focus on the long eighteenth century.

Following a lovely open-air reception in the inner courtyard of the Braun Music Center, festivities commenced on the first evening with a panel discussion ‘in lieu of a keynote address’ centred on Karol Berger's seminal book Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Introduced and moderated by Andrew Talle (Northwestern University), this event included four invited presentations followed by an open discussion. Karol Berger (Stanford University) spoke first, offering a welcome summary of his book's main thesis – ‘that it was only in the later eighteenth century that European art music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously’ – and taking the opportunity to renew and deepen the questions the book poses about the relationship between music, time and history. My contribution (Jessica Waldoff, College of the Holy Cross) used Frank Kermode, E. T. A. Hoffmann and William Weber to focus on the sense of an ending in both musical narratives and narratives about music, and to pose questions about causation. Why does this shift occur at this time? What is the relationship between events internal to the music and external to the music? To what degree, for example, might we understand events in music history – say, the rise of the classical concert repertory that would eventually standardize into a musical canon – as a product of this new ‘modern’ conception of time? Bruce Alan Brown (University of Southern California) offered a stimulating reflection that invited Berger to respond to books written since the publication of Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow, especially Robert Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Edward Klorman, Mozart's Music of Friends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). He drew on Berger's analysis of time in Mozart's operas to explore temporal structures and representations of the sublime in the first-movement development section of Mozart's Symphony No. 39, k543. Robert Marshall (Brandeis University), whose enduring image of ‘Bach the Progressive’ was certainly relevant, focused here on the relationship of space and time in Bach's music to draw a portrait of ‘Bach the Architect’, who ‘explores extraordinary, intricate architectonic designs or structures held together by the gravitational force of functional tonality’. Berger responded to each paper in turn, and all four speakers took questions from the floor in a wide-ranging discussion that soon involved many participants who had reread the book for the occasion.

On Friday morning Thomas Grey (Stanford University), speaking on behalf of the Music Department, and Andrew Talle (programme-committee chair) offered a warm welcome to all. The first session then opened with a paper about the representation of coffee and its culture in the music of Bach and Mozart. ‘Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht’, Pierpaolo Polzonetti (University of California Davis) bellowed into the auditorium – just in case anyone wasn't paying attention. We all looked up from our coffee cups as he began a journey that took us from the Coffee Cantata and Così fan tutte to the chemical effects of coffee (as understood in the eighteenth century) and finally to an imagined coffee house for dead composers. This paper was especially effective both in rethinking the way cultural issues presented on stage resonate in the theatre and the wider culture and, as readers will perhaps have gathered, as a piece of theatre itself.

Other papers in this session on social contexts, moderated by Kathryn Libin (Vassar College), were focused on the intersections of musicians and the marketplace. Noelle Heber (Berlin) offered a comparative exploration of Bach's and Mozart's finances with an emphasis on what is known about their freelance activities. Christine Blanken (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) offered an informative study of the sale of Viennese fortepianos in Saxony and northern Germany, expertly delivered in her absence by Mark W. Knoll (C. P. E. Bach: The Complete Works). This paper drew on the correspondence between Ambrosius Kühnel (Leipzig), Leopold Sweitzer (Vienna) and a substantial number of Viennese instrument makers to offer a compelling portrait of the types of instruments that dominated the market in Saxony and northern Germany in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

In the afternoon, the conversation turned to reception studies under the expert moderation of Ellen Exner (New England Conservatory of Music). The four papers on this session ventured in vastly different directions, ranging from questions of attribution and influence that persist in the Italian transcriptions of J. S. Bach, J. Bernhard Bach and Johann Gottfried Walther, investigated in a paper given by Eleanor Selfridge-Field (CCARH and Packard Humanities Institute), to the hitherto unexplored challenges of mapping Bach reception using a computer database platform, detailed in a paper given by Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University). ‘Visualizing Networks of Bach Reception during the Enlightenment’ demonstrated the capability of a website she is developing to plot Bach networks on maps of Europe as snapshots in time. At present the database includes only familiar sources (drawn from the Bach Dokumente volumes 3 and 5), but the effect of seeing the website in action on the big screen was striking.

A particular highlight of the afternoon was a presentation given by Moira Hill (Northfield, Minnesota), ‘The Hamburg Reception of C. P. E. Bach and Mozart through the Passion Settings of C. F. G. Schwenke’. This paper painstakingly established how Schwenke (elected Music Director by the church authorities in Hamburg after the death of Bach in 1788) incorporated the music of others into his oratorios (all written between 1790 and 1813), using ‘parody, pasticcio and adaptation’ to celebrate the work of admired composers. Of special interest are Schwenke's use of Mozart's Requiem, Haydn's Seven Last Words and C. P. E. Bach's St John Passion. In a paper with a strikingly different focus, Morton Wan (PhD candidate, Cornell University) placed Mozart's Fantasy and Fugue in C major, k394 (mentioned in an oft-cited letter that Mozart wrote to his sister on 20 April 1782), and the Fantasy in F minor for Mechanical Organ, k608, of 1791 within the context of the eighteenth century's fascination with musical machines and early automata. In a proliferation of connections, he linked the feminine with the fugue and generative counterpoint with present-day forms of rule-based music that can be produced by a computer program to ask a question about how ‘Mozart's contrapuntal erudition’ might be understood to ‘reflect an Enlightenment ontology of music’.

On Saturday morning Daniel R. Melamed (Indiana University) moderated a session devoted to links between Bach and Mozart. Drawing on new evidence from J. C. Bach's work for his father in Leipzig and his early career as a composer in Berlin, Stephen Roe (London) examined the question of Johann Christian's German musical heritage. Of special interest was his exploration of six keyboard concertos from this period (w c 68–73), five of which exist in autograph. Half of the movements are in minor and include extremes of various kinds, abrupt changes of tempo and other features that perhaps show the influence of C. P. E. Bach and the Berlin school not found in his later works. Still, Roe argued, these compositions and others from the Berlin years demonstrate the emergence of an individual style that, though influenced by the family, moves in a new direction. He ended with a question about whether the German heritage vanished under the tutelage of Padre Martini in Italy or whether it served as the underpinning of the works in London that later influenced Mozart.

David Schulenberg (Wagner College), in his paper ‘Mozart and the Bach Tradition’, asked questions that complemented and extended Roe's exploration. He traced J. C. Bach's compositional development in Berlin and Italy to argue that the ‘astonishing transformation’ of the Bach tradition under the influence of Quantz, the Graun brothers and certain Italian musicians (such as Martini) was both essential to Bach's achievement and ‘an essential prelude to Mozart's further development of the resulting style’. He concluded that the oft-proposed view of a Bach tradition passed down to Mozart through J. C. Bach cannot be sustained, and he illustrated the point with beautifully performed music examples. There was a nice counterpoint here and in the ensuing discussion between his conclusion and Roe's.

Michael Maul (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) approached the Bach–Mozart relationship by revisiting a moment that has been central to biographies of both composers: the performance of Bach's Singet dem Herrn at the St Thomas School in April of 1789 to which Mozart is said to have responded, ‘Now this is something from which one can learn!’. The details of this story, reported by Friedrich Rochlitz (Allgemeine musikalishe Zeitung (21 November 1798), columns 116–117) and others, leave a number of questions unanswered. Who was there? And who provided the eyewitness details of these accounts? Johann Friedrich Doles, mentioned by Rochlitz, was no longer in place as director in April and his replacement, Johann Adam Hiller, did not take up his new post until June. So who directed the performance given for Mozart in April? Maul presented new evidence to suggest it was the Prefect of the Choir who conducted the performance Mozart heard, a bass singer: Johann Friedrich Samuel Döring.

The Saturday afternoon session, moderated by Paul Corneilson (C. P. E. Bach: The Complete Works), was devoted to form and function in eighteenth-century music. Jonathan Salamon (Yale University) proposed an addition to Robert Gjerdingen's framework of galant schemata: a pattern called the ‘Leo’, based on one of Leonardo Leo's solfeggi and related to the Romanesca, and he too performed his musical examples beautifully. Salamon's argument established the presence of the Leo in works by Bach and others earlier in the eighteenth century and then emphasized Mozart's ‘deliberate, structural use of the Leo as an archaizing gesture’ with a focus on his chromatic Gigue in G major, k574. Among the questions that followed, Daniel R. Melamed asked if it was significant that this work was written in Leipzig (dated 16 May 1789, during Mozart's visit there), and a very interesting discussion ensued.

A highlight of the afternoon was a paper on ‘The Emergence of the Recapitulation in Eighteenth-Century Binary Forms’ by Yoel Greenberg (Bar-Ilan University), which offered a remarkably broad and persuasive investigation of the gradual emergence of sonata form from baroque binary form that focused on the use of the ‘double return’ in the music of several members of the Bach family as well as in early works of Leopold Mozart, Haydn and Mozart. To grossly oversimplify an eloquent and detailed presentation, his examples showed that in many early instances (before 1750) the double return occurred, but was unremarkable, and did not possess the function we have come to associate with it. It is only through ‘a continuous process of adoption and reinterpretation of the double return’, Greenberg argued, that the synthesis of binary and ternary structures we recognize as a hallmark of sonata form in the 1770s and 1780s could develop. In the final paper of the day, Caryl Clark (University of Toronto) discussed the music of Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-George, the celebrated biracial violin virtuoso who was director of the Concert des amateurs when Mozart was in Paris in 1778. In asking questions about whether these two composers met and how the former's compositions may have influenced Mozart, Clark's paper reminded us that further research into Boulogne is needed.

The conference concluded on Sunday with a panel session devoted to digital resources for eighteenth-century music, moderated by Eleanor Selfridge-Field and featuring Norbert Dubowy (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum), Mark W. Knoll, Jesse Rodin (Stanford University) and Craig Sapp (Stanford University). Panel members reported on digital projects focused on J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach and Mozart, and participants were given a tour of the CCARH Lab at Stanford, which houses a number of ongoing encoding projects for eighteenth-century scores.

Other special events included three coordinated concerts. The Stanford Chamber Players – Debra Fong (violin), Jessica Chang (viola), Christopher Costanza (cello) and Stephen Prutsman (piano) – performed Bach and Mozart in Braun's Campbell Recital Hall on Friday evening to a full house. The Stanford Chamber Chorale and Orchestra, conducted by Stephen M. Sano, gave two performances of Mozart's Requiem, k626 (in the completion by Robert Levin), and J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, bwv1048, on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. Business meetings for both societies were held consecutively in a single open meeting. The Mozart Society mourned the loss of Daniel Heartz (1928–2019), honorary member and generous benefactor of the Society, and the Bach Society awarded an honorary membership to Robin A. Leaver.

Overall, this first collaborative meeting of the American Bach Society and the Mozart Society of America was a wonderful occasion to discuss scholarly advances and explore complementary intersections, made all the more pleasant by the gorgeous surroundings at Stanford. For most of us, sadly and unexpectedly, it marked the last chance we would have in 2020 to meet with colleagues at an in-person conference. Let us hope that we will be able to return to attending similarly stimulating events (live and in person) soon!