The fourth edition of this conference, hosted by the Historical Performance Institute of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, was held at their beautifully leafy but – out of term – eerily quiet campus in Bloomington. The conference coincided with the opening of the Bloomington Early Music Festival, allowing evening performances related to some of the themes discussed during the day. Over thirty papers, presentations and lecture-recitals offered a historical spread from the medieval to the mid-twentieth century (indeed, one paper spanned that entire period), encompassed three continents’ music and addressed current social, pedagogical and performance practices, all of which necessitated some difficult decisions for participants.

The opening plenary address, ‘The Art of Education: Interdisciplinarity and Historical Performance’, was given by Brianna Robertson-Kirkland (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). During an entertaining presentation featuring sewing, dancing and experimenting tenors, she analysed the first phase of the Eighteenth-Century Arts Education Research Network (EAERN), noting the changing relationships that have led to successful interdisciplinary work. These involve not only connections between scholars and participants, but also the nature of the research: the process rather than the output becomes dominant. Robertson-Kirkland closed by proposing a new model for interdisciplinarity that will be developed through the second phase of EAERN's projects: a network of relationships that link past textual evidence from different fields and establish a creative tension with embodied ‘memory’ in present performances.

Plenary sessions bookended each day. It is worth mentioning in passing the disappointment expressed by Jeffrey Kurtzman (Washington University in St. Louis) at the continued propagation of notions that are demonstrably false in recent editions of the Monteverdi Vespers. His packed presentation offered substantial printed, liturgical and theoretical evidence for the order of performance, function of the sacri concerti and realization of tempo relationships, noting that much confusion has been derived from creating modern problems out of a historically unproblematic situation. The other plenary sessions were closer to eighteenth-century concerns. Ross W. Duffin (Case Western Reserve University) responded to his critics in a talk taking its title from Geminiani – ‘“Propriety and Justness” in the Eighteenth Century’. Duffin presented theoretical and musical examples to contextualize the language of eighteenth-century treatises, suggesting that words such as ‘pure’ and the German ‘rein’ do not refer to the mathematics of tuning systems, rather to their quality. He proposed that an extended 1/6-comma meantone was the most likely system within which instrumentalists performed. Duffin's arguments sit comfortably with what eighteenth-century theorists wrote; they do not, however, take into account the potential dialogue between modern-day, practising musicians and historical theory or performance. The dominance of the historical theoretician and present-day keyboard player has sometimes been exaggerated in recent performance practices. String players, for example, despite decades of experience in placing their notes carefully with a keyboard, will still instinctively migrate towards a purer, ensemble intonation system when a keyboard is not present or inaudible. I suspect the last word on this debate has yet to be heard.

‘Christoph Bernhard, Rhetoric, and Performance’, the plenary address from Adam Gilbert (University of Southern California), began in the seventeenth century with its titular theorist, demonstrating that any musical material that is not consonant counterpoint is a rhetorical figure. Gilbert gave a whirlwind introduction to seventeenth-century rhetoric before his examples, taken from Bernhard himself, through Purcell and ending with Bach viola da gamba sonatas, had the delegates calling out rhetorical figures from the floor. Gilbert demonstrated that Bernhard's continued influence as a theorist into the eighteenth century allows for a deeper understanding of composers such as Bach. He advised the performer ‘know what you're doing, but don't do something special; the music is already doing it for you’.

The keynote address, delivered by Thomas Forrest Kelly (Harvard University), covered a topic of equal relevance to all of the delegates. ‘Present Tense. Does the Past Have a Future?’ took as its starting-point a beautiful leaf of eleventh-century manuscript from Benevento, with its Greek text phonetically transcribed into Latin. He augmented this relic of performance practices from the distant past with a series of recordings of the manuscript with which he has been involved as editor and consultant – made by local amateurs, a Hungarian Schola and by Lykourgos Angelopoulos with Ensemble Organum. Despite the constancy of the manuscript and Kelly's presence, the disparate interpretations, timbres and performance styles were striking. He used these examples to begin an examination of the past of performance: the places, the events, the institutions and the technology. Although Kelly is as unable as the rest of us to determine the future, he alluded to the title of the conference and its host institution with a clarion call to ‘perform or die!’.

I was, unfortunately, unable to attend the paper by Kimary Fick (Oregon State University), ‘The Kenner at the Keyboard: Character and Expression in the Music of C. P. E. Bach’, as it clashed with my own presentation (Christopher Suckling, Guildhall School of Music & Drama) on Purcell's King Arthur. I reflected on the process of editing and recording King Arthur with Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort & Players. The reduction of a ‘dramatick opera’ from stage to disc and the ephemeral nature of its sources – could an ur-King Arthur ever have existed as a notated work? – required a re-evaluation of intention when performing this music. Our interpretation was moulded by the creative tensions between new scholarly and performance work and twenty years of performing tradition within the Gabrielis, resulting in novel readings of familiar material and the prospect of a more honest dialogue between historical performance, its practitioners and the audience. The first paper in my session, ‘Performing Guillaume Du Fay's Chant with Voices and Organs, 1458–1953’, was a virtuoso piece of archival research by Barbara Haggh-Huglo (University of Maryland College Park). Documenting the survival of Du Fay's chant in the Low Countries across centuries of political turmoil, Haggh-Huglo presented her results through of a series of eight imagined concerts, one for each epoch, based on the Recollectio office. Her concert for 1745 included First Vespers, Matins and Second Vespers from the Collegiate Church of St Vincent in Soignies, alongside organ praeludiums and versets by Abraham van den Kerckhoven (c1618–1701). Haggh-Huglo has provided a framework for performance that may be equally helpful in other repertory. She acknowledged that bringing these imagined concerts to fruition will take significant further work by musicians, not least addressing questions of suitable organs and acoustical spaces.

In ‘Tributaries of Neapolitan Keyboard Improvisation: Francesco Durante's Regole per l'accompagnamento, Partimenti diminuiti, and Esercizio ovvero sonata per organo’, John Mortensen (Cedarville University) introduced his audience to the possibilities opened up to the modern-day musician by the study of eighteenth-century partimenti. Mortensen emphasized the physicality of studying regole and partimenti – how the rules teach the fingers voice leading, the student eventually tacitly learning invertible counterpoint. He catalogued Durante's patterns, all of which are characteristic of Neapolitan keyboard music: contrapuntal transparency, simple points of imitation, limited thematic development and virtuosic, witty endings. Mortensen concluded his presentation with an improvised piece in Durante's style; this was, indeed, a virtuosic and witty ending to the session.

Loren Ludwig (University of Virginia) introduced ‘The James River Music Book (c.1738) and the Viola da Gamba in Early Eighteenth-Century English Colonial America’. This newly recognized source doubles the page count of surviving instrumental music from tobacco-colony America. Named by Ludwig after a major Virginia river, the book bears the inscription ‘Edward Tarpley his book 1738’. It is a rare source of gamba music from the Americas, and may be the earliest American source for Purcell, Lully and Handel. Although scordatura indications confirm that the book undoubtedly contains gamba music, no concordances have yet been found in the known gamba literature. A manuscript in Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum, GB-Cfm 647, shares a watermark and, although the James River pieces are not close enough to be a direct copy, the Fitzwilliam manuscript might contain a source for the variations which make up the second suite of the James River book; these Ludwig subsequently performed. The second half of the paper emphasized the proximity of the manuscript to a culture of slavery, noting that every aspect of colonial musical life involved slaves; even pumping an organ requires an understanding of the music. Anticipating the theme for the final day – diversity and historical performance – Ludwig acknowledged that the usual tactile relationship with a manuscript had become more complex and asked what the result of cross-community listening might be on performing practices which have previously been considered to be largely white.

A remarkable concluding plenary session from Ayana Smith (Indiana University) considered ‘Race and Representation in Baroque Opera: Some Thoughts on Pedagogy, Scholarship, and Performance’. She noted that early music, as a museum of cultural artefacts, can re-enact embedded historical processes when we perform it. Smith used Rameau's ‘Les Sauvages’ to illustrate her argument, demonstrating the complexities of narrative and representation that surround any attempt to perform Les Indes Galantes. Our assumptions about the utopian French Enlightenment immediately engage us with race, and Smith returned to the opening theme of the conference – interdisciplinarity – to expand our framework. This helped reveal the subtleties surrounding the visit of Native Americans to Paris in 1725 and representations of this event by Rameau in 1735, allowing us to recover some meaning from different cultures’ representations of each other. As well as working on the challenges of performing ‘Les Sauvages’ today, and the ease with which it is possible to slip from mimesis into mockery, Smith also asked why ‘Les Sauvages’ is in the canon, noting how it helped define French cultural nationalism and, by extension, strengthened racial segregation around the turn of the twentieth century. Smith concluded that by engaging with the work in new ways today, we can effect a transformation away from the twentieth century.

The concerts of the Bloomington Early Music Festival held during the conference focused on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century recorder repertoire. Alan Gilbert's recital with soprano Jennifer Ellis Kampani and lutenist Jason Yoshida was notable for Gilbert improvising an entire programme of seventeenth-century ground basses. His La Follia was reminiscent of Corelli – entirely idiomatic, yet clearly Gilbert. There were also outbreaks of amateur music-making after the festival concerts. These likewise stayed in seventeenth-century England, yet they did much to cement the welcome extended by the conference convener, Dana Marsh, and students from his department; it was also a pleasure to hear them in concert following the final session of the conference.