This late November conference devoted to Arcangelo Corelli and held in his home town of Fusignano was just one of several events organized by the Festival Musicale Estense 2013 to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the composer's death. Concerts that focused on broadly defined themes – Corelli e il ’700 Europeo (4 October, Modena), Inedito Corelli (27 October, Modena) and Bononcini & Corelli (8 December, Monteombraro) – also took place, and these within an even wider range of performances hosted by Festival Musicale Estense of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Italian music. The International Symposium Arcomelo 2013, however, stood out as the only event of the festival to focus on scholarship devoted to Corelli's life and music.

The sessions of this conference, beginning on a Thursday afternoon and concluding on a Saturday evening, were entitled Corelli and the Instrumental Tradition of Bologna; Issues of Composition and Performance; Bass Instruments and the Realization of the Continuo in Corelli's Time in Rome; History, Context, Documents; and Influences. For all that, the themes emerging from the twenty papers given over these five sessions divided more clearly into categories of compositional practice and style, influence, performance practice, social context and revisions of the Corellian canon. This last stems from the discovery by Guido Olivieri (The University of Texas, Austin) and Enrico Gatti (Koninklijk Conservatorium Den Haag – Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Verdi di Milano) of a manuscript (MS 177, Fondo Antico della Biblioteca del Sacro Convento, Assisi) that contains chamber sonatas attributed to Corelli. According to Olivieri's paper on these sonatas, they may be juvenilia dating from Corelli's time in Bologna, based on the particular dance types chosen and on the stylistic features in them that relate to music known to be by Corelli. Two further contributions focused on the early dissemination of Corelli's music: Constance Frei (Université de Genève) examined the impact of letter-press print technology on Roman prints and the sometimes altered slurs and double stops of Bolognese reprints, while Agnese Pavanello (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) studied the early manuscripts that preserve Corelli's music for the evidence they contain of his compositional and editorial processes. On the basis of her study, Pavanello made a convincing case for authenticating works previously considered apocryphal.

Papers on performance practice constituted the largest group and addressed widely diverse questions: how Corelli himself held the violin and, consequently, what his playing technique might have been like (Christoph Riedo, Université de Fribourg; ‘How Did Corelli Play the Violin?’); what prescriptions and what improvisatory liberties with tempo and rhythm we can discover in late seventeenth-century musical notation (Gregory Barnett, Rice University); what bowed bass and contrabass instruments Corelli knew, what their characteristics were and how they were played (Marc Vanscheeuwijck, University of Oregon); what the effects in continuo playing are of the archlute's octave-tuned (ottavate) strings, which are suggested by a manuscript held at the Biblioteca Corsiniana, Rome (MS Musica P.15), and how idiomatic acciaccaturas are to that instrument (Marco Pesci, Conservatorio di Musica Arrigo Boito, Parma). A subset of the performance-practice papers focused on keyboard continuo, with two papers also exploring the possibilities suggested by manuscript sources, in particular the ‘Regole per accompagnare sopra la parte’ found at the Biblioteca Corsiniana (MS Musica R.1). Salvatore Carchiolo (L'Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali Vincenzo Bellini, Catania) detailed the liberties of keyboard performance suggested by the ‘Regole’, and the connections between this source and Corelli's circle of musicians in Rome. Giovanni Togni (Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Verdi di Milano) concentrated on the accented dissonances sanctioned by this same treatise, bolstering its validity with comparisons to remarks found in Marcello's Il teatro alla moda and those in another manuscript on continuo realization (Biblioteca del Conservatorio, Florence, MS D2358).

Common to the presentations of Pesci, Carchiolo and Togni – all of which featured numerous demonstrations – was the question of just how busy and how dissonant Roman continuo playing might have been in Corelli's time. Continuing with this topic, Marc Vanscheeuwijck moderated a roundtable discussion of ‘Suonar pieno’, a term drawn from Francesco Gasparini's 1708 treatise on continuo playing that refers to a full style of harmonization that comes even at the expense of voice leading. This featured contributions by Carchiolo, Togni and Pesci, plus Jörg-Andreas Bötticher (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis), Anna Fontana (Verona) and Michael Hell (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz), who collectively advocated a more thickly textured style of continuo realization that also incorporates the piquancies of appoggiaturas, mordents and acciaccaturas.

Those papers that focused more on Corelli within his milieu also illuminated his performance practices, but within the specific context of Roman music and liturgy, as evidenced by archival sources. In this vein of research, Teresa Chirico (Conservatorio di Musica Licinio Refice, Frosinone) detailed the performance of oratorios and concertos, spatial arrangements of voices and instruments, and the use of theatrical machines and other ephemera during Roman Quarant'Ore celebrations of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Luca della Libera (Conservatorio di Musica Licinio Refice, Frosinone) reported on the testimony of Corelli's activities found in two rich Roman collections of archival documents, the Fondo Bolognetti all'Archivio Segreto Vaticano, which attests to Corelli's activities as violinist and ensemble leader, and the Archivio Generale Compagnia di Gesù, which focuses specifically on his participation in the music at the church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale. Sandro Pasqual (Ferrara), by contrast, studied the profession of violinist as it was practised in Bologna, focusing not only on the diverse professional circumstances of violinists from the rank and file to virtuosos, but also on the luthiers who were known to them and the instruments they might have played.

Further papers focused on Corelli's compositional process and style. Lindsey Strand-Polyak (University of California Los Angeles) argued that Corelli employed stock harmonic–melodic formulas – harbingers of the later galant manner – as a means of cultivating a more refined compositional style than that associated simply with violin virtuosity. Pierre-Alain Braye-Weppe (Conservatoire Municipal de Musique Gaston Litaize de Montereau-Fault-Yonne) took a close look at the viola parts of Corelli's Op. 6 concerti grossi, to show that the concertos are more than mere aggrandisements of trio sonatas. Andreas Pfisterer (Universität Regensburg) offered new insight into Corelli's compositional technique by showing his reworking of selected dance movements by Giovanni Battista Vitali, and Alberto Sanna (Liverpool Hope University) proposed an approach to Corelli that transcends the long-held interpretations of him as either the product of historical influences (the diachronic view) or the perfecter of classic formulas (synchronic). Sanna instead argued for an interpretation of Corelli's music as the product of his performing experiences.

The influence that Corelli had on later composers is well-trodden territory, but four papers from this conference took that topic in unexpected and fruitful directions. Pinuccia Carrer (Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Verdi di Milano) traced the Corellian influence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French pedagogy, beginning with François-Auguste Gevaert (Cours méthodique d'orchestration (Paris: Lemoine, 1890)) and working back to the influential Jacques-Martin Hotteterre (L'art de preluder sur la flûte traversiere; sur la flûte-a-bec, sur le haubois, et autres instrumens de dessus (Paris: author, 1719)). Aaron Carpenè (John Cabot University, Rome) examined the evidence that links Corelli's sonatas with Bononcini's cantatas, offering illuminating material on their distinctive shared use of chromaticism. In ‘Corelli e “l'angoscia dell'influenza”: declinazioni corelliane nell'opera di Francesco Maria Veracini’ (Corelli and the ‘Anxiety of Influence’: Corellian Declensions in the Work of Francesco Maria Veracini) Antonella D'Ovidio (Università di Firenze) revealed a mediated Corellian influence upon Francesco Maria Veracini, in which the younger composer sought to innovate, sometimes boldly, while working with clear and sometimes advertised Corellian models. And Lowell Lindgren (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) investigated the sonatas of Nicola Cosimi and Nicola Francesco Haym, two Roman string players who knew the composer but spent a significant part of their careers in London, to show their distinctive and even un-Corellian approaches to the Corellian genres of solo and trio sonata.

The three days of the conference featured five concerts, devoted to unpublished Corelli, particularly the chamber sonatas attributed to the composer in the Assisi manuscript; Corelli and his Bolognese contemporaries (Giovanni Maria Bononcini, Giovanni Battista Vitali and Pietro Degli Antonii); Corelli and both Roman and Bolognese contemporaries (Carlo Mannelli, Vitali and Bononcini); harpsichord music from Corelli's time; and the composer's Op. 5 violin sonatas.

The most significant discovery of the conference was Assisi MS 177 and its chamber sonatas attributed to Corelli. That new source and the earlier authentication of a few works from the appendix to the critical edition of Corelli's music led to a consensus that the canon of authenticated works needs to be revised. There was also broad agreement among continuo players to add more voices to realizations, as well as to incorporate unnotated dissonances. Significantly, both of these points would find similar support the following week from a mostly different set of scholars participating in a Corelli symposium held at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. (See the conference report later in this issue.)