There is no finer collection of historical keyboard instruments in the United Kingdom than that found in St Cecilia's Hall, and certainly no other gathered in a building originally constructed as a concert hall in the 1760s; so it was with awe and gratefulness that keyboard players and scholars from across the globe convened on a warm weekend in July in the Scottish capital. Fascinating papers, moving concerts, instant camaraderie and some hazards of twenty-first-century urban existence combined for a memorable occasion. Organization was in the very capable hands of Andrew Woolley and colleagues, primarily at the University of Edinburgh.

A tour of the two main rooms of instruments – continental and British – at the Hall was the first event. As we were led by Eleanor Smith (University of Edinburgh) down the narrow aisles of harpsichords, organs, claviorgans, virginals and spinets, some plain, others highly decorated or polished to a sparkling finish, everyone's fingers and ears itched with anticipation. Only ears could be satisfied, and John Kitchen (University of Edinburgh) did the honours; the results can be appreciated at a distance thanks to the availability of several CDs on which numerous of the instruments can be heard (<www.homepages.ed.ac.uk/ezhm01/friends/publications-price.htm>).

The conference organizers may have wanted to focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but in the event they included papers from the mid-sixteenth – John Koster (University of South Dakota) on ‘The Emergence of Falsas, Durezze e Ligature, and Chromaticism in Keyboard Music: National or International?’ (the latter being the right answer) – to almost the end of the nineteenth century – Russell Stinson (Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas) on ‘The Reception of Bach's Organ Works in the Organ Studio of César Franck’ (Franck having died in 1890). This was in fact no detriment, for it allowed attendees, should they so desire, to track the use, reuse and augmentation of styles, figures and forms across time as well as across the spaces of Europe and the Americas.

With thirty-nine papers arranged in simultaneous tracks of seven sessions and a plenary, and three concerts, your correspondent did not hear everything in person, so I will focus on some themes and highlights. The complete list of abstracts can be found at <www.ichkm.music.ed.ac.uk/conference-programme/presentation-abstracts>.

Preluding emerged as a thread, both as a compositional technique or genre and as a keyboardist's necessary skill. As Penelope Cave (University of Southampton) pointed out in ‘“Lessons designed for the Use of Young Ladies”: Preluding for Beginners’, this was a skill not just for professionals and the best amateurs, but one taught to students in order for them to improve their tonal understanding and mastery of scales, arpeggiation and ornamentation. It included the realization of figured bass and improvising upon a chord progression. Could it be that the prelude or preluding arose as a way for keyboardists to loosen their fingers or to become familiar with an unknown instrument, allowing free play but within limits? Desmond Earley (University College Dublin), in ‘French Basso Continuo Performance Technique: The Arpeggiated Gesture in préludes non mesurés’, showed how the peculiar notation used to indicate these gestures in, for example, the preludes of Louis Couperin in the Bauyn manuscript from about 1660 (F-Pn, Rés Vm7 675) can be most informative. Minna Hovi (Sibelius-Akatemia, Helsinki) asked why no preludes by Jacques Champion de Chambonnières are known; she believes it is because he continued to focus on French ideals in music as opposed to Italian innovations such as those adopted by Couperin.

As far as the Americas are concerned, the North featured in three papers, the South – Brazil, to be precise – in one. Louis Brouillette (Montreal) showed how popular keyboard arrangements of Corelli's Opp. 1–6 became in North America, not only in published editions but also in manuscripts (over forty of which have survived in the UK, USA and Canada). Patrick Hawkins (Columbia, South Carolina) pointed to the continuing demand for and supply of keyboard instruments in Charleston, South Carolina, from London in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, including one instrument that has survived to the present. One of the early music teachers in Charleston was Charles Theodore Pachelbel (1690–1750), a son of Johann. Another teacher there for a brief period in 1727–1728 was James Parry, then aged fifteen, who had fled from Nathaniel Priest, the tyrannical organist and master of the choristers at Bristol Cathedral. Parry's life of misadventure was mentioned in my paper (David Hunter, University of Texas at Austin), which drew attention to Parry's autobiography, The True Anti-Pamela, published in 1741 but long neglected, in which the music teacher recounts his ill-fated amour with an heiress along the Herefordshire–Monmouthshire border. Joseph Butler (Texas Christian University) discussed the personal keyboard manuscript of Francis Hopkinson (1737–1791), one of those who signed the Declaration of Independence (1776). This manuscript includes two organ pieces by Hopkinson's teacher James Bremner, brother of publisher Robert, who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1763. Lastly, Mário Marques Trilha (Lisbon) introduced us to the overlooked keyboard works of Marcos Portugal (1762–1830), who spent many years in Brazil. The works include not only reductions of arias from his own operas but also solo keyboard pieces and a method of solfeggio with continuo-bass accompaniment.

Opera was present not only in reduction but also in its fully realized form in a paper by Peter Holman (University of Leeds) entitled ‘Politics in the Pit: Directing Italian Opera from the Keyboard (or Not) in Georgian London’. The current scholarly consensus has it that there was a form of dual control in which the first violinist and first harpsichordist collaborated. Holman showed that this is not true for the first half of the eighteenth century, during which time the continuo – typically comprising the composer at the harpsichord and a cellist – was in charge. When violinist Felice Giardini because music director in 1754, it was he who led the band. Later still, according to Holman, an equilibrium was reached, with the leader and the keyboard player (using a harpsichord until about 1810 and a piano thereafter) sharing direction. Baton conducting only began at the Haymarket Theatre in 1832, when the young Michael Costa moved from the piano to a conductor's rostrum. Holman used some of the paintings by Marco Ricci known as ‘Rehearsal of an Opera’ (thought to date from the period 1708–1711) as examples of early continuo practice but pointed out that the pictures, though often thought to represent scenes in London, more probably show Italian interiors and people.

The influence of the change from harpsichord to fortepiano was manifested in two main ways in editions of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, according to Chiara Bertoglio (Facoltà Teologica dell'Emilia Romagna, Bologna). Arising from what might be characterized as Catholic and Protestant approaches to editing, the former reliant upon authority and the handing-down of tradition, the latter upon establishing the text and permitting interpretation, Bertoglio showed how these approaches resulted in markedly different editions. When one overlays this with changing aesthetic attitudes – from preferring amazement to highlighting consistency, from emphasizing articulation to emphasizing dynamic contrast – all made possible by technological change, as well as with the sheer increase in numbers of students (too many to be taught individually), the instructive editions of The Well-Tempered Clavier can be interpreted not only on the basis of their immediate content but also for cultural origins and sensitivities.

Undoubtedly the most scientific paper was that given by Giulia Nuti (Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano), ‘Instrument Choice in the Performance of Late 18th-Century Parisian Keyboard Repertoire’. Though pianists may scoff at the idea of dynamic markings existing in harpsichord music, Nuti has undertaken a series of experiments to determine whether modern audiences hear the considerable tonal variety that can be achieved in harpsichord performance. The results show not only that there are measurable dynamic differences (varying between four and seven or more decibels, depending on the register and touch), but also that those differences are perceptible even by non-musical listeners. The instrument chosen for performance determines the sonority, tempos, dynamics and ornamentation that are employed and also, we might say, the kind of listening or concentration required of the audience.

The conference finished with a magnificent recital given by Davitt Moroney (University of California, Berkeley) on three of the historic instruments of pieces from Parthenia or The Maydenhead, to celebrate its four hundredth anniversary, plus movements from Henry Purcell's Suite in D major. Too soon we – and the followers of the British Open golf tournament being played at Muirfield some twenty miles to the east of Edinburgh – had to take our leave of the Lothians and the Firth of Forth.