The fourth annual Musicking Conference at the University of Oregon featured more than twenty events over five days. With a continuing theme of ‘Cultural Considerations’, the conference maintains a core focus on historical performance practice while continually broadening its scope to include increasingly diverse interpretations of the topic. The free public concerts, lecture-recitals, academic panels, masterclasses and interactive workshops thus provided opportunities for scholars, current and former University of Oregon music students, and community members alike. In this report I will focus specifically on those events pertaining to this journal's remit.

The conference began with a performance of Giacomo Antonio Perti's La Beata Imelde (Bologna, 1686), directed by Marc Vanscheeuwijck (University of Oregon). Perti's two-part oratorio tells the story of the Bolognese saint Imelde. It is unlikely this oratorio has been performed in recent times, and it was here presented on the saint's feast day. The work was beautifully performed in the Oregon Bach Festival's Tykeson Rehearsal Hall by a small ensemble of period instruments and soloists. Notably, the performers all read from copies of the composer's manuscript parts.

One entire day of the conference was designated ‘Education Day’. Christopher McGinley (University of Minnesota) presented a session entitled ‘Cantare alla Mente: Renaissance Practice to Modern Pedagogy’. He used interactive exercises to teach the basics of improvised polyphony, stretto canons, puzzle canons and falsobordone. His session convincingly advocated a style of vocal pedagogy that uses these practices to facilitate critical thinking and aural confidence in students. McGinley successfully guided the group (composed of community members and university music graduates and undergraduates) towards solving a puzzle canon by Giovanni Battista Martini. A second session with Evan Harger (Michigan State University) demonstrated how orchestra teachers can develop interpretative skills in their students using approaches from historical performance practice. Using Jean-Féry Rebel's Les Caractères de la Danse (1715), Harger conducted an ensemble of University of Oregon students through multiple versions of a passage, each version focusing on such a component as range, pitch, rhetoric or poetic metre. The workshop by Nicholas Sharma (University of Oregon) centred on Mannheim composer Anton Fils's Sinfonia in G minor (c1760), which survives in manuscript. In a lecture presentation, Sharma focused especially on the challenges of interpreting manuscripts and the editorial decisions involved in producing a scholarly performing edition of the work. Before the work was played, he discussed the scholarship surrounding the Mannheim school which informed the rendition. The day culminated in a ‘Musicking Education’ evening concert, featuring music and topics explored during the three workshop sessions.

This year, academic panels were scheduled for later in the conference, allowing some flexibility for presenters travelling from outside of Oregon. In a panel entitled ‘Space and Identity’, the paper ‘Sara Levy's Salon: Amateur Keyboardists and the Sovereign Feminine’ by Holly Oizumi (University of Oregon) expanded on scholarship relating to female salonnières, centring on the musical activities of Prussian musician Sara Levy. Oizumi looked beyond documented evidence of Levy's musicianship and considered the agendas behind historiographical narratives of Levy's life, much like Suzanne G. Cusick's approach to Francesca Caccini in her article ‘“Thinking from Women's Lives”: Francesca Caccini after 1627’ (The Musical Quarterly 77/3 (1993), 484–507). This process allowed Oizumi to challenge previous depictions of Levy that stressed limitation, arguing instead for a strong sense of musical agency. Ultimately, Oizumi suggested that rather than assuming such private Prussian salons were strictly confining for women musicians, we should consider the salons as sites where they had the opportunity to be tastemakers. My paper (Emily Wallace, University of Oregon), called ‘Playfulness at the Keyboard: Domenico Scarlatti's Sonata in A Major K. 113 with an Application of Somaesthetic Theory’, explored the physical experiences of performing Scarlatti's keyboard music. Using k113 as a case study, I applied a somaesthetic method that considered the embodied experience of playing the piece, an approach similar to Elisabeth Le Guin's ‘carnal musicology’ in Boccherini's Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Centring the sensations I experience when performing k113 allowed me to construct a narrative of physical intensification over the course of the piece, which is both encouraged and denied by differing versions in manuscript sources. I concluded by suggesting that gestures in Scarlatti's music cannot reliably be framed according to the visual or aural spectacle alone, but must also be considered through the lens of the performing body.

Natascha Reich (University of Oregon) presented ‘“Squeaking Pipes” and “Childish Sounds?” Mozart's Works for Automatic Pipe Organs and Their Performance Practice Today’, which explored lesser-known works by the composer for automatic organ: k608, k616 and k594. While none of the automatic instruments for which Mozart composed survives, Reich used instruction manuals, extant instruments and written accounts of Mozart's thoughts about automatic organs to suggest some mechanical properties the instruments must have had. While the performance practice of such pieces is complex, Reich's method of ‘historically informed organology’ regarding pitch, tempo and expression in these pieces suggests that modern performances need not be as ‘mechanical’ as previously assumed.

This year's conference featured two guest artists: Susanne Scholz (Kunstuniversität Graz) and Dario Luisi (Johann-Joseph-Fux Konservatorium Graz). Each gave an extended keynote lecture, taught masterclasses to University of Oregon music students and performed as soloists in evening concerts. The keynote lectures were entitled ‘Golden Instruments Guarded by Angels: The Five Freiberg Renaissance Violin Family Instruments – Their Relevance in 16th- and 17th-Century Music, and Consequences for Their Playing Practice’ (Scholz) and ‘A Bridge Between Ages: The Development of Violin Sound Aesthetics from the End of the 16th Century to the Early Romantic Era’ (Luisi). A surviving family of five renaissance violins from the same maker was found in the hands of putti in the Freiberg Cathedral of Saxony. Scholz founded the Chordae Freybergenses ensemble to perform on copies of these instruments for the first time. In her lecture she detailed ongoing research on the Freiberg violins and musical Saxony, and in particular she described the information gained from playing these instruments as a historically informed musician (including experiments with bowing, chiavette transposition and playing position). In a similar theme of learning from the instruments themselves, Luisi's presentation discussed the violin bridge through history – in particular how different bridge designs affect sound production.

The musical showcase for Scholz and Luisi was the evening concert ‘Circling Corelli: The Trio Sonata before and after 1700’, also featuring Vanscheeuwijck on cello and bass violin and Margret Gries (University of Oregon) on harpsichord. The concert offered an assortment of trio-format works by Giuseppe Scarani, Tarquinio Merula, Giovanni Battista Buonamente, Gioseffo Maria Placuzzi, Giovanni Maria Bononcini, Carlo Ambrogio Lonati, Domenico Gabrielli, Antonio Caldara and, of course, Arcangelo Corelli. The guest artists shone as historically informed interpreters and rhetoricians of the music, showing the less familiar influences, styles and formats from which Corelli's famous works emerged.

Each day of the conference also featured an afternoon ‘intermezzo lecture-concert’. These concerts were diverse and impressive in their offerings. I found ‘The Emperor's Silk Strings: Violin and Guqin Music Reimagined’ to be particularly stunning. In this lecture-concert, Addi Liu (Case Western Reserve University), Derek Tam (San Francisco Early Music Society) and David Wong (Tranquil Resonance Studio) explored the traditional ‘elegant gathering’ of guqin music in the early eighteenth-century Chinese court. The group focused specifically on a detailed account of courtier Gao Shiqi's visit in 1703 to the Kangxi Emperor, examining intersections of guqin repertoire and the imported ‘Corellian’ Italian style. Inspired by the event, the group reimagined its soundscape through arrangements of guqin music, and through works by Teodorico Pedrini, an Italian violinist who arrived in Beijing in 1711, played with silk-stringed instruments.

The conference closed with a performance of Quirino Colombani's Il martirio di Santa Cecilia (Rome, 1701) by the University of Oregon Oratorio Orchestra directed by Marc Vanscheeuwijck. The oratorio featured University of Oregon students Alison Kaufman (playing the part of St Cecilia), Sara Brauer, Matthew McConnell and Dylan Bunten. The sources for this work presented challenges that were addressed by both current and former students, with Emily Korzeniewski (Yale University) supplying the orchestra with modern performance parts based on the manuscript. Secondly, the manuscript copies lacked second and third violin voices (where they would originally have been improvised), so composer Samuel Kalcheim (University of Oregon) reconstructed some of the missing parts as needed. He had also provided an original Sinfonia to open the oratorio, composed in the style of Colombani. The research and creative imagination that had brought the work out of obscurity provided a foundation for a tasteful realization by the performers. The final concert thus encapsulated a spirit of discovery, creativity and boldness that had been present throughout this year's conference.

The website for the Musicking Conference states, ‘this conference is inspired, organized, and directed by University of Oregon historical performance practice faculty and students who wish to celebrate the connections between musicology and performance. Thanks to the support of local donors and of the [University of Oregon] School of Music and Dance, all Musicking events are provided free of charge to everyone’. It is my hope the conference will continue to balance such valuable community engagement with future experimentation in performance practice. The resulting diversity of events has thus far been exceptionally rewarding.