Few eighteenth-century musical accounts have enjoyed such wide-ranging influence as Charles Burney's travelogues and A General History of Music (London: author, 1776–1789). While Burney's descriptions of musical life in Europe in the 1770s and 1780s have proven valuable for scholars researching topics across the spectrum of eighteenth-century music, his role as performer-composer and man of letters more generally has often garnered less attention. An interest in devoting critical study to Burney himself and the contexts in which his writings were produced was the impetus behind a seminar taught by David Yearsley at Cornell University in the autumn of 2007. This in turn inspired a gathering of musicologists interested in Burney's works, and in larger questions surrounding musical travel and the birth of modern music history and criticism in the eighteenth century. Organized by Ellen Lockhart, Annette Richards and David Yearsley (all of Cornell University), the conference was hosted by the Cornell Department of Music. The event took place in conjunction with a production of The Cunning Man, Burney's 1766 adaptation of Rousseau's opera Le devin du village.

The three-day conference included thirteen papers on a variety of topics, ranging from Burney's role as musical tourist and proto-musicologist to his political, social and scientific inclinations. The first session, in tandem with the weekend's musical performances, centred on The Cunning Man. Suzanne Aspden (University of Oxford; ‘The Cunning Man: Burney as Student and Historian of National Opera’), whose paper was read by Annette Richards, explored Burney's perception of opera, not just as a pan-European aristocratic phenomenon but also as a potentially nationalist endeavour. She examined both the reception of Burney's adaptation of Le devin du village in Britain and the changes Burney made to the opera that moved it distinctly away from the pastoral genre. Jacqueline Waeber (Duke University; ‘Recovering Le devin du village from Its Adaptations’) traced the shifting conception of the opera's generic identity, arguing that its radical simplicity permitted it to be malleable on the stage. She considered changes of tone introduced in the opera's many adaptations, including the idea that Burney's description of The Cunning Man as a ‘Musical Entertainment’ may have resonated with the tradition of the English burletta.

Many of the papers delivered at this event were effective in bringing a nuanced perspective to the attitudes underpinning Burney's writings. Matthew Head (King's College London; ‘Europe's Living Muses: Women, Music and Modernity in Burney's History and Tours’) considered the means by which Burney rehabilitates the status of women in his works, arguing that he positions the female musician as a measure of civility and a symbol of reform, in opposition to the rigidity of despotism. An investigation into Burney's political thought and its bearing on his musical descriptions was mounted by Damien Mahiet (Cornell University; ‘Charles Burney, or the Philosophical Misfortune of a Liberal’), who traced the gradual evolution of Burney's defence of music as beneficial to the public good. And Burney's trade in flattery as a means of gaining access to archives and libraries, and as the expected recompense within the courtly economy, was outlined by Ellen Lockhart (‘Burney the Flatterer’). Her investigation, moreover, did much to illuminate the extent to which Fanny Burney mediated her father's posthumous image.

Various aspects of Burney's aesthetics proved to be a fertile source of discussion over the course of the event. Thomas Tolley (University of Edinburgh; ‘“More Like a Picturesque Tour Than a Musical One”: Burney's History and the “Rage for Painting”’) elucidated Burney's knowledge of the visual arts by outlining the contemporary collections of artworks with which he may have been familiar. Tolley suggests that Burney saw his General History of Music as an analogue to the many already-extant histories of the visual arts (such as Vasari's famous Lives of the Artists), and intended it as a vehicle by which to elevate the status of music among the arts. Burney's long-standing interest in science, on the other hand, was the focus of a paper by Emily Dolan (University of Pennsylvania; ‘“Certain Science”: Burney, Haydn, and Modern Music’). She argued that Burney's writings position him as a kind of ‘sentimental empiricist’, and that his accounts of instruments (both scientific and musical) marked him as distinctly ‘modern’ in the eyes of his contemporaries, much as Haydn's sensitivity to instrumental textures distinguished him as ‘modern’ in the late eighteenth century. Mark Ferraguto (Cornell University; ‘Burney and Musical Dynamics at the Crossroads of Style’) examined Burney's special interest in orchestral effects and crescendos, focusing on shifts in the use of dynamics over the course of the eighteenth century in relation to the metaphor of chiaroscuro. Ferraguto's findings highlighted Burney's preference for what he perceived as the most up-to-date effects, and brought into question whether Burney adequately represented innovations beyond those of the Mannheim school. And Monica Eason Roundy (Cornell University; ‘“The Silence Was Sound”: Burney and the 1784 Handel Commemorations’) explored the circumstances surrounding Burney's account of the Handel celebrations of 1784, including the careful negotiation necessitated, on the one hand, by Burney's obligations to the king and other parties as ‘official historian’ of the event and, on the other, his evident distaste for the privileging of music of the past over that of the present.

Travel was naturally a theme of many of the presentations at the conference. Among these was the paper of David Yearsley (‘Burney's Footsteps: British Organ Tours to the Continent’), which outlined the factors that caused German organs and organists to become must-see attractions for eighteenth-century English musical tourists (most notably the fact that German organs, unlike their English counterparts, typically possessed a pedal board). From this vantage point, Yearsley sees Burney as the predecessor of later English travel diarists, furnishing a standard mode of reception to be accepted or rejected by subsequent generations of tourists. Similarly, Pierpaolo Polzonetti (University of Notre Dame; ‘Burney's Fieldwork as a Musical Tourist’) positioned Burney in the tradition of Europeans visiting Italy in search of the ‘exotic self’ and the ancient roots of their own culture. Taking the folk-song ‘Aria del Tasso’ (transcribed by both Burney and Tartini) as a central example, Polzonetti argued that much of what Burney records during this journey bears resemblance to a kind of ethnomusicological fieldwork.

Alternative takes on the theme of musical travel (or lack thereof) were evident in both of the conference's keynote addresses. The first was delivered by Elisabeth Le Guin (University of California, Los Angeles; ‘Why Didn't Burney Go to Spain?’), in which she considered the extent to which Spain and Spanish music are marginalized in Burney's General History. Central to this discussion was an uncovering of eighteenth-century English attitudes towards Spain, and an interrogation of the received scholarship on which both Burney and his contemporary John Hawkins relied. Vanessa Agnew (University of Michigan; ‘The Eye – or the Ear? Eighteenth-Century Travel, Music History, and the Rhetoric of Witnessing’) presented the second keynote address the following day, in which she examined the effects of Burney's dependence on the somewhat unreliable account of the explorer James Bruce as his chief source on Egyptian music. Agnew's discussion of the notion of the journey, or its re-enactment, as the eighteenth-century means of establishing a connection to the past shed light on the central role of travel in the creation of eighteenth-century histories of music.

The breadth of Burney's musical experience furnishes many possibilities for performances of music with which he may have had a connection, and the concerts offered over the course of the weekend provided an excellent counterbalance to the conference's scholarly discourse. Keyboardists David Yearsley and Mike Lee (Cornell University) delivered ‘A Concert for Dr. Burney’, with readings from Burney's own writings delivered by Annette Richards. The first half of the concert took listeners to C. P. E. Bach's music room, where Burney heard him perform on his famous Silbermann clavichord. Yearsley played fantasias and rondos from Bach's Versuch and Kenner und Liebhaber collections on the clavichord to a hushed – and awed – audience. The second half saw Lee and Yearsley perform one of Burney's great favourites, Johann Gottfried Müthel's Duetto for two keyboard instruments. The three performances of The Cunning Man which took place concomitant with the conference formed a special focal point for the gathering. Performed on period instruments, the production was organized and conducted by Cornell senior Dorian Komanoff Bandy, with stage direction by Lance Davis and choreography by Caroline Copeland of the New York Baroque Dance Company. The opera provided a highly entertaining and uniquely practical opportunity to engage with the musical talents of both Burney and Rousseau, perhaps too infrequently recognized today for their contribution to the musical repertoire. Papers and performances together demonstrated that Burney's continuing significance for music historians lies not only in the wide ambit of his comments on composers, performers and performing circumstances, but also in the detail with which he illuminates contemporary social and aesthetic values. Despite the frequency with which we eighteenth-century scholars draw upon Burney, it is clear that there remains much to be gained from the fruitful pages of his works.