The biennial meeting of the American Bach Society inspired the participation of around fifty scholars, performers and other Bach enthusiasts from the United States, Canada and Germany. Organizers included Ellen Exner (University of South Carolina), Markus Rathey (Yale University), Don O. Franklin (Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh), Steven Crist (Emory University) and Reginald Sanders (Kenyon College), who deserves particular thanks for serving as local arrangements chair, a task he dispatched with characteristic aplomb. Kenyon College offered a beautiful and stimulating setting for the conference, and the American Bach Society owes a great debt of thanks to Kenyon President Sean M. Decatur and Provost Joseph L. Klesner, as well as to their Executive Assistant, Pamela J. Faust, for their warm welcome and help with logistics.

In his excellent keynote address, Christoph Wolff (Harvard University) contemplated C. P. E. Bach's sense of his own place in history. This was a composer who constantly revised earlier works and even burned a ream of music he had composed in his youth, a purge which made him feel ‘glad that they [were] no more’, probably because he was shortly to be visited by a musicologist (Dr Charles Burney). Bach curated a gallery of around 150 portraits of composers, acquiring whatever he could, wherever he could. He also took it upon himself to preserve the ‘Old Bach Archive’, which consisted of crumbling manuscripts of music prepared by a variety of his ancestors. Wolff devoted the end of his presentation to an analysis of the double-choir Heilig, Wq217 (1778), a work C. P. E. Bach composed in hopes that he would ‘not so soon be forgotten in the future’. The music is technically flawless and full of striking effects, with a choir of mortal nations and a choir of angels uniting at the end. Wolff argued persuasively that the Heilig is based upon J. S. Bach's ‘Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum’ from the Symbolum Nicenum of the Mass in B minor, bwv232, a movement C. P. E. Bach spent extensive time trying to correct in his father's original manuscript. (It served in turn as a model for the ‘Oro supplex’ section of the ‘Confutatis’ movement in Mozart's Requiem.) Wolff suggested that the work is thus emblematic of C. P. E. Bach's central position in the history of eighteenth-century music.

Mary Oleskiewicz (University of Massachusetts-Boston) followed Wolff with a wide-ranging multimedia presentation intended to introduce C. P. E. Bach's quartets for flute, viola and keyboard. A self-described ‘schizophrenic scholar-performer’, Oleskiewicz was primarily concerned with interpreting these works’ thorny technical difficulties, a phenomenon made palpable by a demonstration of some of the viola lines. Christine Blanken (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) presented new research on the Breitkopf publishing firm's private archive. She has uncovered previously lost or entirely unknown manuscript sources for symphonies and overtures by J. C. Bach (including Warb C15, C17b, G5/1 and G22/1), as well as chamber music and a ‘Sinfonia’ by W. F. Bach (Fk71/BR-WFB C5). Her research has also unearthed new sources for works by J. S. Bach, including student copies of organ Toccatas (bwv913 and 914) to which the composer himself added numerous emendations. Wolfram Enßlin (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) offered insight into the decisions he and Uwe Wolf made in preparing the new thematic catalogue for the works of C. P. E. Bach, the second volume of which has just been published. Among the central challenges was creating a taxonomy of originality, which ranged in Bach's case from arrangements of works by other composers, to pasticcios, to arrangements of his own works, to wholly original compositions.

Daniel R. Melamed (Indiana University) explored the striking formal juxtapositions found in many of J. S. Bach's vocal works, particularly the Mass in B minor, speculating upon the experiences of its original audiences. He argued that the combinations of old and new music would have been perceived as jarring, regardless of whether or not listeners knew that much of the content had been recycled. Evan Cortens (Cornell University) compared settings of Mein Herz[e] schwimmt im Blut by J. S. Bach (bwv199) and Christoph Graupner, arguing that Bach probably knew the earlier setting by his illustrious contemporary. The President of the American Bach Society, Stephen Crist (Emory University), considered connections between the arias of J. S. Bach and those of one of his most successful students, Johann Ludwig Krebs. The few surviving Krebs arias include ‘Schlage bald, geliebte Stunde’ from KrebsWV110, which appears to have been inspired in part by Bach's ‘Ach schlage doch bald, selge Stunde’ from bwv95. Nicholas Taylor (Washington, D. C.) presented research on the reception of five of Georg Philipp Telemann's annual cycles of church cantatas, which were published between 1725 and 1749, and used even decades after the composer's death. In a practice that may have been widespread, C. P. E. and W. F. Bach both drew upon Telemann's published cantatas for use during ordinary church services, saving their own creative energies for high feast days.

In contrast to most of the source-based papers of other scholars, Robert Marshall (Brandeis University) began his presentation by promising to ‘dare some interpretation’. On the basis of Freudian theory, Marshall speculated on what it must have been like for a composer to have J. S. Bach as a father. Might W. F. Bach have perceived his father's ghostwriting job applications for him as ‘infantilizing’, for example? Interpretation is, of course, not only welcome in Bach scholarship, it is absolutely essential. Whether or not psychoanalytic theories developed around 1900 can be applied to subjects born into a very different cultural and religious context nearly two centuries earlier remains an open question. In any case, Marshall's paper generated much lively debate.

Manuel Bärwald (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) presented the fruits of his investigations into concert life in mid-eighteenth-century Leipzig. It was a revelation to many in attendance that, at the end of J. S. Bach's life, Italian opera troupes were regularly performing in local coffee houses, often using recitatives in German so that listeners could follow the plots. Michael Maul (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) delivered a paper interpreting a mysterious document he recently discovered in an archive in Döbeln. Gottfried Benjamin Fleckeisen's 1751 application letter for the cantor position in that town includes a startling claim: ‘For two whole years [while a boarder at Leipzig's St Thomas School], I had to perform and conduct the music in the main churches of St Thomas and St Nikolai in place of the Kapellmeister’. Maul argued persuasively that Fleckeisen's claim was not empty bravado; he probably had done much of Bach's official work for a full two years, presumably because the ageing cantor was no longer willing to do the bidding of a town council that had been hostile to his music from the beginning of his tenure in Leipzig. It is likely that several other pupils served Bach in this capacity during the 1730s and 1740s. Maul's discovery adds greatly to the image of Bach introduced by the research of Alfred Dürr and Georg von Dadelsen in the 1950s, which proved that the Thomaskantor had composed the vast majority of his church music by the mid-1720s and thereafter repeated the same works again and again. Depending upon one's perspective, Bach's actions can be understood as showing either admirable efficiency or arrogant aloofness.

Peter Wollny (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) offered a fascinating paper on C. P. E. Bach's Fantasy in C major, Wq61/6, which he argued was originally composed for an instrument that could toggle between harpsichord and pianoforte actions. Attendees enjoyed hearing a rendering of this work Wollny engineered to mimic Bach's intended effect. Margaret Butler (University of Florida) and Paul Corneilson (C. P. E. Bach Edition) gave independent papers examining the lives of singers associated closely with Johann Christian Bach. Corneilson's work in particular illuminated the long-standing personal connections between J. C. Bach and Anton Raaff, for whom Bach wrote more arias than any other opera singer. Mary Greer (Cambridge, Massachusetts) presented her thoughts on the influence Masonic activities may have had on C. P. E. Bach's Die Israeliten in der Wüste, Wq238, of 1769. Finally, Moira Hill (Yale University) offered a first-rate paper on what she called the ‘lied-aesthetic’ in C. P. E. Bach's late Passion settings. Hill argued persuasively that towards the end of his life Bach shifted from interpolating songs by other composers (including Franz Benda, Gottfried August Homilius, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel and his father) to interpolating his own songs. She interpreted the rationale for this shift as stemming not only from the general tendency toward simplification of church music in the second half of the eighteenth century, but also from Bach's own preoccupation with songs in his later years.

The scholarly presentations were complemented by some excellent performances. David Yearsley (Cornell University) offered an inventive programme of organ music by J. S. Bach and his sons. The ‘circus’ music of J. C. Bach's ‘Andantino’ was particularly striking, offering an almost surreal contrast with the music of his father and brothers. David Schulenberg (Wagner College) presented a lecture-recital entitled ‘Bach in Berlin: C. P. E. Bach's Revolutionary Keyboard Music of the 1740s. The Washington Bach Consort, led by J. Reilly Lewis, offered the largest-scale performance of the weekend, featuring an excellent rendering of the Magnificat, Wq215, among other works by C. P. E. Bach. For many attendees, however, the performance highlights of the meeting were provided by Newton Baroque. Their performances of chamber music and songs by C. P. E. Bach and Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, led by Andrus Madsen, were spectacularly well curated and executed.

Selected papers from the conference will appear in Bach Perspectives volume 11 (Illinois University Press, expected 2016), to be edited by Mary Oleskiewicz. The next biennial meeting of the American Bach Society is entitled ‘J. S. Bach and the Confessional Landscape of His Time’. It will take place on the campus of the University of Notre Dame on 7–10 April 2016. More information on upcoming events and membership of the American Bach Society can be found at <www.americanbachsociety.org>.