James Webster's impact on Haydn scholarship and historiography is well known. His book Haydn's ‘Farewell’ Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) forced us to question received notions about cyclic organization in eighteenth-century instrumental music, and his writing on music-historical periodization in this journal has devastatingly critiqued the notion of a bifurcated eighteenth century (‘The Eighteenth Century as a Music-Historical Period?’, Eighteenth-Century Music 1/1 (2004), 47–60). Perhaps less well known, however, are his many contributions to the field as a teacher, mentor and colleague, and nowhere were these clearer than at Cornell University in late October 2012, at an event affectionately referred to as the ‘WebsterFest’. The conference organizers – Neal Zaslaw, Elizabeth Bilson and Margaret Webster – assembled a programme featuring papers by fourteen accomplished scholars. The speakers included nine who had gained their doctorates at Cornell, two former Cornell undergraduates (now professors of music) and three colleagues.

The conference programme opened with a biographical reminiscence by Lewis Lockwood (Boston University), who first met James Webster in 1963, when the former was a new assistant professor at Princeton and the latter a new graduate student. Lockwood recalled the book release of a musicological tome whose abstruse prose was far removed from the world of musical and historical thought we normally inhabit. Clearly troubled, Webster rose and asked, ‘But what about the good, the true and the beautiful?’. Lockwood praised Webster's down-to-earth approach to musicology, a field to which he ‘has made vital and essential contributions … illuminating for all of us’. David Kim (New England Conservatory), in a different type of reminiscence, explained that he first encountered Beethoven's Sonata Op. 2 No. 1 as an undergraduate at Cornell in Webster's class, and then offered a searching account of the work on a five-octave fortepiano.

In a provocative talk entitled ‘Canons, not Canon’, Hermann Danuser (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) used six different musical settings of Goethe's Erlkönig to argue that we should replace the ‘mono-myth’ of the canon with a ‘poly-myth’. In addition to Schubert's famous setting from 1815, Danuser drew on settings by Corona Schröter (1782), Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1793), Carl Friedrich Zelter (1797), Bernhard Klein (1815) and Carl Loewe (1817) to posit several possible modes of historical enquiry. Schröter, for example, was a member of Goethe's personal circle, and her plain, strophic setting could well have been the poet's ideal. The evening concluded with a performance of Haydn's ‘Harmoniemesse’, featuring the Cornell University Chorus, Glee Club and Chamber Orchestra, under Chris Younghoon Kim.

After noting that one of the many things he learned from Webster was that ‘Haydn never wrote any bad music’, Richard Will (University of Virginia) began the second day by tracing how the performance practice of Don Giovanni, particularly ‘Là ci darem la mano’ and ‘Deh vieni alla finestra’, has reflected contemporary attitudes towards the title character. In applying the general changes in operatic performance that took place around 1900–1930, involving steadier tempos, less portamento and more continuous vibrato, the singer Ezio Pinza ‘invented a new kind of seducer, more brisk than fervent, more commanding than pleading, in a word more “manly”, like the swashbuckling hero of the 1948 Errol Flynn film the Adventures of Don Juan’. Starting with Don Giovanni's statement in the Act 2 trio that no one has a more fertile talent than he, Elaine Sisman (Columbia University) focused on his behaviour within ensembles, particularly his ‘improvisation’ in that context. Showing how Mozart's complex tonal dramas interpret Da Ponte's text, Sisman argued that in his attempts to be all things to all people, Don Giovanni reveals his true character, or lack thereof.

Drawing on recent trends in topical and rhetorical analysis, Tom Beghin (McGill University) explored their various implications for performance. Recalling Burney's depiction of C. P. E. Bach at the clavichord – ‘his eyes were fixed, his under lip fell, and drops of effervescence distilled from his countenance’ (The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces, second corrected edition, volume 2 (London: T. Becket, 1775), 270) – Beghin argued for the use of facial gestures as an added component, demonstrating with prerecorded videos of Mozart's Sonatas k309 and 332 and Haydn's Sonata hXVI:52. He thus suggested a different, more oratorical, less fragmented sense of what Mozart's father referred to as il filo. Citing Clementi, who identified ‘grazioso’ as a style, Michelle Fillion (University of Victoria, British Columbia) demonstrated that the term implied a musical topic with specific rhetorical properties, generic associations and social functions beyond its ancillary purpose as tempo modifier. The feminine associations of ‘grazioso’ cut against the hyper-masculine image of Beethoven that has characterized the reception history of the composer. This has implications for our understanding of the ‘Diabelli’ Variations and the last ‘Rasumovsky’ Quartet, Op. 59 No. 3, among other works. As Mary Hunter (Bowdoin College) noted in her paper, the kaleidoscopic use of musical topics in eighteenth-century instrumental music has often been explained as a reference to opera buffa. Drawing on the works of Haydn, Mozart and others, she offered a partial debunking of this explanation, arguing that topics in opera do not in general signify in the same ways as they do in instrumental music.

Berthold Hoeckner (University of Chicago) revisited his concept of ‘aesthetic buoyancy’, which he has defined elsewhere as a piece's ‘ability to unmoor itself from one context and float to another with the abiding impulse to be heard anew’ (‘Preface’, 19th-Century Music 34/3 (2011), iii). Extending this to the canon, he referred to Danuser's talk from the previous day, arguing that Schubert's Erlkönig has greater aesthetic buoyancy than other contemporary settings. In his paper from the field of experimental linguistics, Jeremy Day-O'Connell (Knox College, Illinois) began by noting the ubiquity (if not omnipresence) of the descending minor-third ‘calling contour’ – most familiar in English when we call out ‘yoo-hoo’ – across many languages. He presented the first attempt at quantifying this phenomenon in a laboratory setting and then posited some musical connections, concluding with ‘art imitating life’, musical examples of the calling contour from Purcell to the Beatles, and Simon and Garfunkel.

Emily Green (Yale University) drew a parallel between the eighteenth-century title page and the then-commonplace ‘It-narrative’, wherein an inanimate object narrates its autobiography in a form of ‘proto-anthropology’ – in The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), for example, Tobias Smollett's use of an atom as the narrator allows him safely to satirize English politics. Cleverly, Green constructed her own paper as an instance of the genre, narrating the story from the perspective of the title page in question: Tommaso Giordano's Favourite Airs in ‘The Critic’ (London, 1781). In much the same way that the first narratives about coins sought to accustom the public to consumption, the eighteenth-century title page ‘humanized’ the musical object.

At the start of the final day of the conference Rebecca Schaefer Cypess (Rutgers University, New Jersey) argued against the commonly held notion that musical innovations in the seventeenth century originated in vocal music. Citing a 1612 letter by Galileo Galilei, in which he claimed the supremacy of the instrumental over the operatic, she demonstrated that this first flowering of instrumental music had less to do with the imitation of song than with the early modern fascination with machinery – with the use of instruments as tools to understand the self. Nicholas Mathew (University of California, Berkeley), whose paper was read by Sarah Day-O'Connell (Knox College) on his behalf, noted the poor reception that has plagued the chorus ‘In Praise of Industry’ (‘O Fleiß, o edler Fleiß’) from Haydn's Seasons since its first performance – the earliest accounts represented it as ‘a musical victory over bad poetry’. Drawing connections with Adam Smith, and citing Webster's critique of the notion that The Seasons is the earthly counterpart to the elevated Creation, Mathew effectively argued that Haydn's ‘Fleiß’ chorus reminds us that the repression of the economic dimension of work is conceptually foundational to the modern notion of the work of art, in which we have divorced aesthetic value from the labour of creation.

Identifying Napoleonic Milan (1796–1814) as the first modern city in Italy, Emanuele Senici (Università di Roma La Sapienza) argued that the increasing frequency and importance of operatic criticism in the periodicals of that time was a result of ‘political impotence’, of a ‘failure to develop an effective public sphere’. In the first years of the regime, there were more periodicals published than in the entire history of the city to that point, and the resultant restriction of press freedoms necessitated a shift away from the political to the aesthetic.

The final session saw both Jessica Waldoff (College of the Holy Cross) and Richard Kramer (Graduate Centre of the City University of New York) presenting papers on Konstanze's aria ‘Traurigkeit’ from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Waldoff explored Michael Fried's concept of ‘absorption’ as it related to the staging of the scene, asking how one stages solitude and how theatrical choices made in this scene affect the role it plays in the drama. Drawing on exchanges between Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Nicolai and Gotthold Lessing, Kramer investigated the dramaturgy of sensibility and sorrow, demonstrating Mozart's subtle use of tears as involuntary emotional expressions to signify Konstanze's inner distress. Kramer's analysis of Mozart's setting led Webster to point out that ‘the winds nuance things we are meant to understand’, that the orchestra provides knowing commentary on the dramatic events.

Rich in academic insight, the conference weekend felt like a celebratory reunion; nametags were hardly necessary. In all, the event was an extraordinary success, a fitting tribute to the man in whose honour it was held.