How many composers of instrumental music active in Spain during the second half of the eighteenth century would the average reader of Eighteenth-Century Music be able to name? Not many, one would expect, except for Scarlatti and Boccherini. This question, however naive, points to a complex historiographical situation in which aesthetic values, scholarly traditions and ungrounded musical (pre)conceptions play their part. The question should not any longer be whether Scarlatti and Boccherini are to be considered Spaniards or Italians, as was the main concern of early Spanish musicologists (who certainly did not consider these composers as part of Spanish music history). This issue is ultimately as irrelevant as it is perverse. The main challenge – or at least one of them – for a scholar of eighteenth-century music should be to understand in what contexts these two well-established composers worked, how Spanish musical life and traditions might have influenced their compositional procedures and to what extent they determined or conditioned other local (or, in some cases, European) composition. These are some of the questions that this seminar aimed to discuss.

This meeting thus attempted to go beyond Scarlatti and Boccherini and to focus on traditionally undervalued composers in order to draw a more vivid historical picture. Studies of eighteenth-century music in Spain have tended to promote two approaches almost exclusively: one is institutional, devoted to the official structures of music-making and the cataloguing of professional posts and musicians' names; the other is archival, concentrating on listing and describing sources. However necessary these two main approaches are, they have only rarely been combined to consider how the music was composed in technical terms. This becomes particularly relevant when instrumental genres central to the Western musical tradition – such as the violin sonata and the string quartet – were being established and profound transformations in patterns of music's consumption and dissemination were taking place. This new outlook can be summed up in concepts of style, genre and market, as encapsulated in the title of this seminar. The meeting was made up of four sessions, gathering more than a dozen scholars from different countries and generations.

The first session focused on the compositional and formal aspects of violin sonatas and guitar music, exploring how composers faced the problem of constructing works of certain dimensions. Using a sort of statistical method, Enrico Careri (Università di Napoli) went through a large corpus of violin sonatas published in Italy between 1700 and 1750, looking into the origin of (one type of) sonata form in dozens of movements. Thus he paid attention to the tonality of each section, whether a double return took place in the recapitulation, how material was organized and how emphatic was the presence (or absence) of a reprise. An analysis in similar terms was carried out by Ana Lombardía (Universidad de La Rioja) on the violin sonatas of Francisco Manalt and José Herrando. It provided a good measure of the extent to which Italian influences shaped Spanish music. In Spain, sonata movements apparently showed a more varied typology than was the case in Italy – as far as it can be proved, considering that the tradition of violin sonatas in Spain can hardly be reconstructed before the 1730s. For instance, Manalt's Sonata No. 3 (from his Obra harmonica, published in Madrid in 1757) presents surprising cyclic elements, unifying the piece beyond single movements. For his part, Thomas Schmitt (Universidad de La Rioja) studied the challenge that guitar composers (and, for that matter, other composers of instrumental music) faced from the 1740s in trying to make works longer during the decline of the continuo as a constructive principle. Applying the theories of Joseph Riepel (1709–1782) to particular guitar works offered a fresh perspective from which to explain compositional procedures, whether or not his treatises had by then became known in Spain.

The second session tackled three different aspects of Boccherini. Christian Speck (Universität Koblenz-Landau) explored his cello concertos, a repertory little known today that nonetheless caught his contemporaries' interest. A look into the corpus of around twelve cello concertos, mostly from the 1770s, reveals a significant number of borrowings and quotations from other Boccherini works, suggesting that some cello sonatas might initially have been conceived as preparatory ‘sketches’ for concertos. Loukia Drosopoulou (York University) presented an extraordinarily detailed analysis of articulation marks in Boccherini string quintet manuscripts. If trying to find out the composer's intentions by scrutinizing his sources is always a must, in the case of Boccherini this is particularly true, as he is one of the most refined, rich and poetic composers when it comes to performing marks. Equally astonishing was the discovery presented by Lluís Bertrán (Université Paris-Sorbonne). He aimed to reconstruct the emergence of the string sextet as a genre – a trend that, although unnoticed by mainstream music history, was closely related to Spanish contexts: the string sextet was cultivated in Spain as early as the mid-1770s, before it began to appear in other parts of Europe. Bertrán convincingly showed that the Sextet G460, attributed to Boccherini, had in fact been composed by Gaetano Brunetti (L268). Furthermore, the sextets of the two composers reveal close stylistic links, while confirming the outstanding talent of Brunetti, a composer surprisingly virtually unknown nowadays.

The last two sessions emphasized particular repertories, unusual social functions and little-known genres. Partly continuing the theme of the first session, Xosé Crisanto Gándara (Universidad de La Rioja) described an early eighteenth-century Portuguese manuscript recently found at Coimbra that contains a set of violin sonatas. This source will become particularly important in the study of this genre in the Iberian Peninsula, as it is one of the very few examples of a miscellaneous collection from this period containing sonatas by foreign composers. Italians such as Albinoni, Corelli and Carlo Ambrogio Lonati are well represented, but other unexpected authors are also included, such as the London-based composer Johann Christoph Pepusch. At the other chronological end of the spectrum covered by the seminar, Carolina Queipo (Universidad de La Rioja) presented an overview of the ways in which editions of instrumental music circulated in the early nineteenth century. Her paper focused on the case of the Parisian firm Janet et Cotelle, reconstructing the channels through which around two hundred of their editions reached the maritime city of A Coruña in the far north-east of Spain. Among the composers, Haydn and Boccherini were the best represented.

The papers by José Carlos Gosálvez (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid) and Joseba Berrocal (Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles) focused on marginal repertories in the study of late eighteenth-century instrumental music, in this case the cello and the oboe respectively. As in many other instances, the drastic lack of documentary materials should not necessarily be interpreted as evidence that these instruments were not cultivated. By gathering small scraps of evidence in an almost archaeological way, Gosálvez listed a significant (though still modest) number of sources containing cello works that are documented to have circulated in Madrid. It is now clear that Boccherini was far from being the only cello virtuoso in this area. For his part, Berrocal avoided the temptation of enlisting dubious sources by proposing some well-thought-out categories that are useful when attempting a comprehensive study of the oboe in eighteenth-century Spain: among others, musical functions, performing spaces, the nature of documentary sources and the oboe player's profile.

The last two papers ended the proceedings with subjects similar to those discussed at the start of the seminar: the establishment and construction of two central musical genres in the eighteenth century, the solo sonata and the string quartet. Judith Ortega (Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, Madrid) analysed a collection of thirty-six sonatas, nearly all unpublished, preserved at the Royal Chapel archive. The characteristic feature of this corpus is that it was composed in the last third of the century and was to be performed by candidates applying for membership of the Royal Chapel, as part of their examination. Thus the composers represented were generally those regarded as the best in Madrid (such as Francisco Corselli, Manuel Cabaza, Brunetti and Juan Oliver Astorga), and the works tended to display virtuosic traits and idiomatic stylistic features consistent with the developing instrumental writing of the period. Finally, Miguel Simarro (Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, Barcelona) explored what was the real innovation of the late eighteenth century: the string quartet. Contrary to the general assumption, the string quartet was established in Madrid from the late 1760s, however incipiently, and enjoyed a certain presence there. Again, Simarro's paper went beyond Boccherini by focusing on the quartet series of two lesser-known composers, Manuel Canales and Joseph Teixidor. Simarro discussed themes such as the influence that Boccherini's Op. 11 exerted on Canales (in his two sets published in Madrid in 1774 and London in 1782) and the formal regularity of movements and tonalities in Teixidor's quartets (in one set from c1801).

In addition to the seminar there was a piano recital given by Beatriz Montes (Universidad de La Rioja). Works by Haydn and Beethoven were combined with ones by Spanish contemporaries rarely performed in the concert hall, including Mateo Albéniz, Antonio Soler, Joaquín Montero, José Larraz and Pedro Nuez. The seminar was part of a three-year research project entitled ‘Public, Town, Style: Musical Life in Madrid during the Enlightenment (1759–1808)’ supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science based at the Universidad de La Rioja. The project will continue in the near future with a further seminar.