Back in the 1960s, one of the true experts of eighteenth-century music, Jan LaRue, could complain about a ‘relative neglect of the Classic era’, arguing that ‘the appearance of several giant tomes in recent years, each devoted merely to a single segment of this literature . . . , suggests that we have much to learn’ (LaRue, review of The Sonata in the Classic Era by William S. Newman, The Musical Quarterly 50/3 (1964), 398). In a similar vein, some thirty years later, Neal Zaslaw diagnosed that there was still a problem in connection with this period, in that ‘vast geographical and social musical landscapes may be, and usually are, passed over virtually in silence’ (Zaslaw, ed., The Classical Era: From the 1740s to the End of the 18th Century (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1989), 3). To be sure, the situation has clearly changed for the better in past decades, thanks to increased scholarly efforts as well as the availability of music by lesser-known composers in both modern editions and recordings. Nevertheless, it is equally true that music historiography and music analysis still focus on music by the classical triad of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. If considered at all, music by their contemporaries is often judged in comparison with and by the standards of the so-called ‘master composers’.

In an attempt to fill this lacuna, the two-day conference at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken (the title of which translates as The Analysis, Performance, and Editing of Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music ‘beyond’ Haydn and Mozart), organized by Stephanie Klauk, aimed to advance the field on several fronts. First, it encouraged scholars to address lesser-known composers in order to broaden the musical repertoire and thus to enrich the historical landscape. Second, it invited scholars to approach this repertoire with the help of innovative and historically informed analytical methods. Finally, participants were encouraged to use computational methods in their research, in addition to considering issues of performance practice and editing.

Let us first turn to those papers that concerned themselves with the rich potential of historically informed music analysis. In his keynote lecture ‘The Perils of Being Right: Mozart's “Obviously Corrupt” Minuet K. 331’, Robert O. Gjerdingen (Northwestern University) demonstrated how knowledge of voice-leading schemata can help us not only to understand the make-up of a musical work in the galant style, but even to ascertain correct readings of potentially ‘corrupt’ passages. This is the case with the minuet of Mozart's Piano Sonata in A major, k331. The identification of a voice-leading schema that Joseph Riepel famously dubbed Fonte along with a knowledge of the conventional uses of this schema (including the combination with a nested Fenaroli schema) allow us to appreciate Mozart's extraordinary artistic choice, rather than seeing it as the result of faulty textual transmission. This view is also confirmed by the autograph manuscript of the sonata that has quite recently been rediscovered.

Drawing on Gjerdingen's schema-theoretical approach and combining it with James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's sonata theory, Gilad Rabinovitch (Georgia State University) proposed an integrated approach to the analysis of a large corpus of eighteenth-century music. In particular, Rabinovitch highlighted the advantages and innovations involved in such a combined approach, demonstrating how it can enable us to arrive at a refined understanding of the formal syntax underlying the proto-sonata exposition in the earlier galant style. Rainer Kleinertz (Universität des Saarlandes) considered the four main ways of opening the development section suggested by Francesco Galeazzi in the description of sonata form outlined in the second volume of his Elementi teorico-pratici di musica (Rome: Pilucchi Cracas, 1796). Each of these options was illustrated with examples from the classical repertoire, especially chamber music by Haydn, Mozart and some of their contemporaries. In so doing, Kleinertz proposed new analytical perspectives on hitherto neglected compositional strategies within the development section of sonata-form movements.

The majority of speakers addressed relatively unfamiliar repertoires and historical centres, paying particular attention to composers linked, in one way or another, to Italy. Walter Kreyszig (University of Saskatchewan / Universität Wien) spoke about the flute quintets Op. 17 (g419–424) by Luigi Boccherini that he is currently editing for the composer's Opera Omnia series (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2005–), illustrating the status of the sources and the problems related to the critical edition. He further discussed the role of an important source for the works which has recently been found: the manuscript, partly autograph, MS 16735, held in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Likewise focusing on Boccherini, Christian Speck (Universität Koblenz-Landau) dealt with the composer's self-borrowings, describing the intricate network of exchanges between the cello concertos and works in other genres. Speck proposed and discussed possible reasons for this practice in relation to Boccherini's approach to solo writing in cello concerts and sonatas – works that the composer first conceived for his own performances as a virtuoso cellist. Another, much less known, Italian composer was examined in the talk by Elisabetta Righini (Forlì). She drew a portrait of Giovanni Battista Cirri (1724–1808), pupil of Padre Martini and member of the renowned Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna. Righini not only offered a fascinating glimpse into the composer's life, but also pointed out some essential features of his instrumental style. Finally, she talked about her recent work on a thematic catalogue of Cirri's compositions.

Klaus Aringer (Kunstuniversität Graz) dealt with a once famous but today largely neglected figure: Ignaz Pleyel. Although Pleyel was, together with Haydn, the most popular composer of the late eighteenth century, he is now primarily known as a pupil of Haydn who later became his former teacher's rival in London. In contrast to his five-month stay in London in 1792 and his later activity as a publisher and manufacturer of pianos, very little is known about Pleyel's stay in Italy during the 1780s. To fill this gap, Aringer sought to reconstruct the composer's Italian journey, examining this episode from biographical, professional and social points of view. Finally he discussed how Pleyel's Italian experience may have affected the style of the music he composed in Italy.

Two speakers addressed the symphony as it was developed in Milan – a topic that has previously been examined by Bathia Churgin with respect to Sammartini's and Brioschi's works. Silvia Del Zoppo (Università di Milano) provided a general overview of the sinfonia milanese, explaining the historical reasons for its rise as well as its relation to the Viennese style and emphasizing the remarkable diversity of the composers involved. Likewise focusing on the sinfonia milanese, Matteo Giuggioli (Universität Zürich) explored the works of a Milan composer less familiar than Sammartini and Brioschi: Francesco Pasquale Ricci (1732–1817). After a thorough survey of Ricci's career, Giuggioli turned to the composer's symphonic output, paying particular attention to some peculiarities of his symphonic style, the dissemination of his symphonies outside of Italy and his contribution to the concertante symphony.

Luca Aversano (Università Roma Tre) considered concertante practices in eighteenth-century Italian instrumental music, highlighting progressive formal and stylistic processes in this repertory. In addition, he demonstrated the presence of more conservative features that ensured stylistic continuity, arguing that the main reason for this continuity may have been the persistence of the ideal of the concerto grosso. Aversano also explained the meaning of the terms associated with these practices, in particular that of the concertone, and pointed out some similarities between these works and those in the genre of the concertante symphony that was to be institutionalized some time later in France. Simone Laghi (Cardiff University) investigated the spread of the Italian string quartet in the British Isles between 1765 and 1790. On the basis of extensive research into the musical sources, he was able to give a systematic account of the rise and fall of this repertoire. In the only paper unrelated to Italy, Marie Winkelmüller (Freiburg im Breisgau) presented research on the German composer Joseph Martin Kraus, who spent most of his creative life in Sweden. She focused on the stylistic peculiarities of his symphonies and especially on the way he conceived musical form, locating Kraus's style between that of the Mannheim symphony on the one hand and Viennese models on the other.

Further papers addressed issues related to the performance and editing of eighteenth-century music. Greta Haenen (Hochschule für Künste Bremen) discussed some still open questions regarding the role of ripieno violinists in orchestral practice at the time of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. These aspects were discussed both in a historical sense and with reference to current trends in historically informed performance practice. Christine Siegert (Beethoven-Haus Bonn) focused on the philological status of Beethovenian musical sources linked to twentieth-century performance practice. Among these sources are the scores of Beethoven symphonies used and scrupulously annotated by modern conductors such as Leonard Bernstein. Siegert discussed possible ways of how to deal with these sources in the framework of the Beethoven critical edition.

Two papers explored the manifold benefits of developing and using, in the age of Big Data, new computational tools for music-analytical purposes. Drawing on the concept of diatonic scales, Christof Weiß (International Audio Laboratories Erlangen) presented an automatized procedure for the analysis of tonal harmony based on audio files rather than symbolic data. As became clear from Weiß’s discussion, this computational tool is particularly effective when dealing with large collections of pieces. In their talk ‘Computergestützte Melodie-Analyse am Beispiel italienischer Streichquartette’ (Computer-Aided Melodic Analysis: Italian String Quartets) Stephanie Klauk and Frank Zalkow (Universität des Saarlandes) took as their starting-point the opening bars of the young Mozart's ‘Lodi’ quartet (k80), illustrating the concepts of the ‘italienischer Zweitakter’ (Italian two-bar phrase; Christian Speck), the Meyer (Gjerdingen) and the Italian quinario (Reinhard Strohm). These three concepts have in common that they offer useful descriptions of ‘Italian’ musical phrases that played an important role in designing musical form in the Age of Enlightenment. Basing their work on a comprehensive corpus of string quartets by Haydn, Mozart and some of their Italian contemporaries, Klauk and Zalkow have developed an automatized procedure to extract the analytical concepts explained at the outset. They argued that the resulting data can be used for further statistical analysis and, ultimately, will have significant implications for music historiography, which would then be rooted more firmly in a broader empirical framework.

This conference succeeded in providing fresh and innovative insights into a seemingly familiar historical period – insights that will be summarized in one of the upcoming volumes of the Saarbrücker Studien zur Musikwissenschaft. Yet at the same time it became clear, even after two intense days of discussion, that LaRue's ‘we have much to learn’ is truer than ever, and that there are ‘vast geographical and social musical landscapes’ that remain terra incognita for modern scholarship.