There was a time when a music theorist who attended a musicology conference was deemed to be consorting with the enemy or, at least, visiting a foreign country. To be sure, around the same time that Leonard Ratner, Charles Rosen and James Webster were composing their foundational studies on the so-called ‘classical’ style, one distinguished theorist doubted the validity of the very concept of musical ‘style’ or ‘stylistic analysis’, which he deemed to be ‘dirty words’ for music theory. (Peter Westergaard, ‘On the Notion of Style’, in Report of the Eleventh Congress of the International Musicological Society, Copenhagen 1972, ed. Henrik Glahn, Søren Sørensen and Peter Ryom (Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen, 1974), volume 1, 71.) Happily, the ensuing decades have seen the pendulum swing back in the opposite direction, toward more permeable disciplinary boundaries and toward greater interaction between historical and analytical research perspectives, as demonstrated, for instance, by the diversity represented on the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Music.

And thus, in the spirit of free exchange (and with my SMT and AMS membership cards firmly in hand, evincing my ‘dual citizenship’), I deemed it safe to attend the joint conference of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music and the Haydn Society of North America, a three-day gathering comprising twenty papers and three musical performances, as well as visits to historical sites related to the Moravian communities in Bethlehem and Nazareth, Pennsylvania (about which, more later). The conference was remarkable for its geographical breadth, touching on topics related to the Americas (Mexico and the North American colonies), China, England, Portugal, Spain and Russia, besides the more obvious centres of eighteenth-century musical life in France, Germany, Austria and Italy. Particularly of note were the quantity and quality of contributions by graduate students and junior scholars (representing over two thirds of the conference), an encouraging sign for the future of our field.

Whilst conference sessions were organized mainly according to composer, genre or locale, several threads emerged that linked papers from different sessions. These included authorship and workhood; influence, modelling, borrowing and adaptation; relations between performers and musical texts; and the re-evaluation of ‘non-canonical’ composers and musical works. Had the schedule included respondents or permitted more time for discussion, it would have been interesting to explore these interstices between ostensibly unrelated papers and to consider their implications for future research.

The proceedings opened with a session on play and interplay in chamber music by Haydn and Mozart. Adem Birson (Cornell University) examined the role of ‘chromatic gestures’ and ‘strange sonorities’ that become climactic focal points in the first-movement expositions of Haydn's quartets Op. 9 No. 1 and Op. 17 No. 6. Birson's paper thus revived a line of inquiry stemming ultimately from Donald Francis Tovey's notion of the ‘purple patch’ (and subsequently developed by others such as Charles Rosen), but his focus on Haydn's early quartet collections corrects a pronounced bias in both the analytical literature and the concert hall. My paper that followed (Edward Klorman, The Juilliard School) discussed the interplay among the instrumental parts and its relationship to sonata-form analysis in two chamber-music movements by Mozart, the first movement of the violin-and-keyboard sonata k304 and the second movement of the piano quartet k493. Certain obstacles in the progress of the form were interpreted as conflicts or rivalries (‘Wettstreit’, as described by Sulzer and Koch) among these multiple agents or personas, who were imagined to be fictionally composing the work, in time, as the piece is played.

The presentation by Dianne Lehmann Goldman (Northwestern University) re-evaluated the authorship of the seventy-one responsories attributed to Ignacio Jerusalem y Stella (1707–1769). On the basis of handwriting analysis and other research, Goldman convincingly argued that seventeen of these works are posthumous arrangements of other Jerusalem compositions (including vernacular arias) composed after Jerusalem's death, whilst another twenty-five contain wind, timpani and/or organ parts added to Jerusalem's original instrumentation by a second hand. (Among these pieces are several presented as echt Jerusalem on albums by Chanticleer and one included in John Rice's recent Anthology for Music in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Norton, 2012).) Goldman argued that the hand in question was probably that of Antonio Juanas, who served as maestro de capilla in Mexico City from around 1791 until 1815 and who possessed both the access to Jerusalem's manuscripts and the compositional ability to create these arrangements and changes of instrumentation. Whilst this significant discovery will hardly damage Jerusalem's exalted reputation, it should encourage scholars to revisit assumptions about the single authorship and the fixedness normally associated with musical ‘works’. It remains for a further reappraisal of Juanas's output to determine whether Grove Music Online's lukewarm opinion – that Juanas's music ‘displays a competent craftsmanship’ but is ‘harmonically less daring … and less flamboyant’ than that of his predecessors Jerusalem and Matteo Tollis della Roca (Craig H. Russell, ‘Juanas, Antonio [Juan Antonio] de’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (12 March 2014)) – warrants revision.

The theme of the international transmission of musical knowledge and style continued with the next pair of presentations. Sterling E. Murray (West Chester University) discussed the symphonic output of William Herschel (born as Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel), the Hannover-born British astronomer who is best known for the discovery of Uranus. Less well known are his twenty-four symphonies, composed in Yorkshire and County Durham from 1760 to 1764. Despite the short period in which these symphonies were composed, Murray argued that they betray a transition from a Germanic, contrapuntal style in the earlier works (entitled Symphonia di camera and scored for strings plus continuo) to a more modern manner in the later ones (simply entitled Symphonia and incorporating winds). Stewart Carter (Wake Forest University) recounted the extraordinary tale of the Mémoire sur la musique des chinois by Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, a French Jesuit priest and polymath residing in Beijing from 1751 to 1793, and its corruption under the heavy-handed and misguided editorial intervention of Pierre Joseph Roussier, whom Carter dubbed ‘the editor from hell’. Based on a study of Amiot's original manuscripts (at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, including Amiot's still-unpublished supplement omitted by Roussier), Carter argued that Amiot's treatise as originally conceived is ‘arguably the earliest systematic work on ethnomusicology in any European language’.

The first day concluded with a pair of papers about C. P. E. Bach by Moira Hill and Markus Rathey (both of Yale University). Hill examined the ‘unacknowledged debts’ of Bach's Passion Cantata (1769–1770) to Graun's Der Tod Jesu (1755), which she aptly described as ‘the most famous work of the eighteenth century that no one [today] has ever heard of’. (Indeed, Graun's work spread as far as Bethlehem, where a score and parts remain in the collection of the Moravian Archives.) Rathey examined Bach's ‘autobiography’ – that is, his contributions to J. J. C. Bode's German-language edition of Burney's The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces (translation published in Hamburg, 1772–1773). Since Burney's original treatment of Bach was based on information provided by the latter when the two met in Hamburg, Bach's contributions to the German edition served not to provide new details but, Rathey argued, ‘to refashion a new self-image’ emphasizing his education and the concept of ‘genius’, and offering a lengthy apologia for Bach's limited travels.

On Saturday morning we turned to the Iberian peninsula for a session entitled ‘Music and Royal Power’. Danielle Kuntz (University of Minnesota) discussed the so-titled oratorio La preghiera esaudita, composed by Giovanni Cavi to celebrate the long-awaited birth of the Portuguese Princess Maria Teresa in 1793. Kuntz's paper focused on the work's circumvention of generic oratorio conventions: namely, its secular subject matter, its non-Lenten performance context and its ceremonial function for the court celebrations at Lisbon's Castelo de São Jorge. And thence to Madrid: Mara Parker (Widener University) discussed Luigi Boccherini's quartettini g216–231, written expressly for King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, all but two of which remain unpublished to the present day. Parker argued that the unusual terms of Boccherini's contract with the Prussian court prevented him from publishing these works, placing him in the rare position of composing for an audience of one – his connoisseur patron – and thus freeing him to explore more experimental compositional approaches.

A session on ‘Opera in European Capitals’ extended from the role of the Moscow Orphanage in managing public theatres (Elise Bonner, Princeton University) to the inclusion of falsely advertised, faux-Italian operas at the Opéra-Comique after around 1750 (Julia Doe, Columbia University) to the role of Michel de la Barre's opéra-ballet Le triomphe des arts (1700) as a model for Rameau's Pigmalion (1748) (Devin Burke, Case Western Reserve University). Burke, whose presentation was awarded the Student Paper Prize, traced the significant musical borrowings, including direct quotations, from the Pygmalion act of la Barre's score, mirroring the well-documented textural borrowings in its libretto, and he contextualized both works within a broader tradition involving animated statues on the Parisian stage.

The following session remained in Paris, opening with a presentation about the Concert Spirituel, jointly given by musicologist Beverly Wilcox (University of California Davis) and art historian Kim de Beaumont (Hunter College / Pace University). The paper focused on a black-chalk sketch dated ‘1778’ by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, which has recently been identified as a representation of the Concert Spirituel. It was also in 1778 that Mozart attended performances at the Concert Spirituel, in what may have been his first experience with symphonies presented in concert halls (as a main event, performed for a mass audience, rather than as an ‘opener’). A lecture-recital by violinist Jude Ziliak (New York City) explored the role of J. S. Bach's music in the playing and teaching of Pierre Baillot, founding violin professor at the Paris Conservatoire. He included a rendition of Bach's Sonata in C minor for violin with keyboard obbligato, bwv1017, performed from (and attempting to match the performance style suggested by) an edition by Karol Józef Lipińsky and Carl Czerny (Leipzig: Peters, 1841).

A trilogy of Haydn papers followed. Chantal Frankenbach (California State University, Sacramento) discussed the kinaesthetic experience of dancing that Haydn's listeners may have experienced when listening to concert minuets. Elizabeth Morgan (Saint Joseph's University) demonstrated, memorably, how the physical gestures and facial expressions of Viennese stage comedy may be transmuted into the performance of Haydn's keyboard capriccios, suggesting an embodied or quasi-theatrical element in the performance of musical humour. The final paper, by Bryan Proksch (Lamar University), focused on Haydn's reception in the mid-nineteenth century, as evidenced by Robert Schumann's (musical and non-musical) writings and by the character Joseph ‘Beppo’ Haydn in George Sand's novel Consuelo (1842).

Sunday morning opened with a session on operatic reform, with a paper on elements of horror in Jommelli and Verazi's Fetonte (1768) by Sarah Bushey (University of Florida) and another by Eric Schneeman (Northeast Lakeview College, San Antonio) on revisions to Gluck's Orfeo for productions in London and Munich, adaptations that effectively reshaped the work to conform to the standards of opera seria (for example by expanding Eurydice's role to ensure sufficient time on stage, create opportunities for vocal display and increase the overall length of the opera).

The conference concluded with a pair of papers about cantatas: Christoph Graupner's Mein Herz schwimmt im Blut (discussed by Evan Cortens, Cornell University) and Telemann's Musicalisches Lob Gottes (discussed by Nicholas E. Taylor, Indiana University). Cortens rightly pointed to Graupner's 1712 cantata and J. S. Bach's 1714 setting of the same text as an inviting opportunity for comparative analysis, since – for all the settings’ stylistic differences – Bach may have known Graupner's setting and used it as a point of reference or model. He also stressed that unlike Bach, Graupner had no sons or students to advocate for his posthumous reputation. In addition, his heirs were refused access to his music, which was retained by the Darmstadt court, where it remained untouched until the twentieth century – by which time Graupner's reputation as a Kleinmeister had been cemented. How might our music history textbooks read differently had Graupner secured release from Darmstadt to accept the Leipzig position that eventually went to Bach?

At the conclusion of the conference, session chair Markus Rathey noted that the Telemann cantata cycle discussed by Taylor (published in Nuremburg in 1744) dates from nearly the same period that the Moravian community settled in Bethlehem (1741). And, indeed, no report on this conference would be complete without mention of the stunning and historically appropriate setting at Moravian College. All conference sessions took place in a building originally known as the Brethren's House, built in 1748 as a dwelling for single men of the Moravian community (and visited by George Washington in 1783). Local arrangements were expertly coordinated by Sarah Eyerly (Florida State University), an authority on Moravian history and herself a descendant of the original Moravian settlers in Bethlehem. Among the special events surrounding the conference were visits to the Moravian Historical Society (in nearby Nazareth, Pennsylvania) and to the Moravian Archives; a tasting of authentic beers (served by a beer historian and impersonator of Johann Sebastian Goundie, Bethlehem's resident brewer from 1803 on); a concert by Duo Marchand of Moravian hymns and songs, accompanied by cittern and harp (interspersed with readings excerpted from historical diaries); and an authentic Singstunde service, recreated by Eyerly from original sources, and sung by the conference attendees with the accompaniment of a Samuel Green chamber organ (built in about 1795).

So, in sum, what is a music theorist's overall take on the 2014 SECM/HSNA conference? It hardly needs mentioning that I was impressed by the scope and variety of topics represented. Very few papers mentioned music that I knew, or at least, knew well, and of course all papers provided rich social, historical and aesthetic contexts for the music under study – not something one can always expect, rightly or wrongly, from every music theory paper. The programme offered a far better representation of research on opera than is typical of theory conferences, which still heavily favour instrumental music. At times I missed closer engagement with the musical scores themselves. In two papers, simple, diatonic modulations from a minor key to the relative major were described as instances of ‘tonal ambiguity’. In another two papers, the aptly named ‘one more time’ technique – a highly conventional method of delaying important structural cadences, deriving from opera buffa and imitated in related instrumental genres – was mentioned as though it were a particular composer's novel invention, rather than a widely shared convention. (See Janet Schmalfeldt, ‘Cadential Processes: The Evaded Cadence and the “One More Time” Technique’, Journal of Musicological Research 12/1 (1992), 1–52.)

I make these remarks only to suggest that all music scholars – whether principally historians, analysts or somewhere in between – have something to contribute to our enduring research questions. Now that ‘style’ is no longer a ‘dirty word’ for music theorists, I look forward to a day – in the not-too-distant future – when a conference on eighteenth-century music will no longer be presumed to be principally for card-carrying historians.