This conference took as its theme ‘Early Music Revivals and the Performance of Spanish Keyboard Music’. It was organized and directed by Luisa Morales, and was held concurrently with the fifteenth iteration of the Festival Internacional de Música de Tecla Española (FIMTE). The symposium and festival (usually held in October) took full advantage of Mojácar's vibrant August atmosphere, which attracts many visitors from around the world for the picturesque beauty of the fifteenth-century town and its proximity to the Mediterranean. This year the symposium, dedicated to the memory of harpsichordist Rafael Puyana, hosted speakers and performers from Australia, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain, Sweden, the United States, the United Kingdom and Venezuela.

Among eighteenth-century-themed papers on the symposium's first session (‘Early Music Revivals in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’) was a lecture-recital by Mac Maclure (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá), piano, and mezzo-soprano Marisa Martins. Maclure explored the influence of pioneer Spanish musicologist Felip Pedrell on a generation of composers including Robert Gerhard, who composed and published a collection of songs for voice and piano based on melodies from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that derived from early Spanish stage works. These melodies, or tonadas, are known today thanks to Pedrell's four-volume collection Cancionero musical popular español (1920). Another lecture-recital, by pianist Ricardo de la Torre (Ada, Oklahoma), provided an overview of Spanish neoclassical bipartite sonatas. De la Torre highlighted the influence of Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas on the music of Manuel de Falla, and demonstrated how the bipartite sonata genre was reinterpreted by the following generation of Spanish and Latin American composers, including Joaquín Rodrigo, Joaquín Nin-Culmell, Angel Oliver Pina and Jorge Croner de Vasconcelos. A paper by Liz Mary Díaz-Pérez (Universidad de Valladolid) focused on musicologist Joaquín Nin's recuperation of and immersion in the works of Domenico Zipoli, Carl Heinrich Graun and Johann Mattheson. The germ of historical curiosity was planted in Nin while he was in Barcelona (1880–1899), where he came into contact with the Institució Catalana de Música, a performance collective formed to foster research into Catalan music and historical practice. Nin published the majority of his articles calling for greater awareness of historically informed keyboard performance in the journal Revista musical catalana, published by the Institució. Finally, Isabel Rocha (Barcelona) traced the formation and development of Ars Musicae, a performance ensemble founded in 1935 by José María Lamaña (1899–1990) to perform music from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries. The history of the group is linked to important figures in the field of Spanish musicology such as Higini Anglés, who performed with and actively took part in the operation of the ensemble, and his teacher Felip Pedrell, who died before the formation of the ensemble, but without whose research and publications much of the ensemble's endeavours would have not been possible. Ars Musicae, which dissolved in 1979, was a pioneer of historically informed performance in Spain, launching the careers of leaders in the field.

In the symposium's second session (‘Early Spanish Keyboard Repertoire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Sources and Questions of Performance Practice’) I (Carlos Roberto Ramírez, Cornell University) examined the evidence for and possible origins of claviorgans in Iberia before 1500, issues of identity arising from the connections between morisco instrument builders and the Catholic court, and how an environment of innovation, diplomacy and print culture contributed to the rise of amateur keyboard practice in sixteenth-century Iberia. A lecture-recital by Judith Conrad (Boston, Massachusetts), played on the clavichord, traced the contributions of Juan Bautista Cabanilles and Vincente Rodríguez to the musical life of Valencia. They served consecutively as principal organists at the Cathedral of Valencia for nearly one hundred years (Cabanilles from 1665 to 1713, Rodrígez from 1713 to 1760), and because they were both locally born and trained, Conrad argued that they helped to foment a kind of ‘Valencian’ style of organ playing and composition.

Three papers focused on the keyboard works of Domenico Scarlatti. Barry Ife (Guildhall School of Music & Drama) compared the significance of Biblioteca de Catalunya M1964, a manuscript containing thirty-nine sonatas, with similar sources at Venice and Parma. He proposed that the differing contents and organization of these three manuscripts may be due to the early circulation of most of Scarlatti's keyboard works in individual copies. The Catalunya manuscript is the focus of a forthcoming edition by Ife, to be made available online with a colour facsimile. A lecture-recital by Lark Powers (East Central University, Oklahoma) focused on Scarlatti's fugues, which have remained largely unexplored as compared to the rest of Scarlatti's output. Powers pointed out the contradictory ways in which scholars tend to talk about these works, discussed problems of their chronology and placed them within the context of fugal writing in Spain, comparing them to fugues by Albero and Soler. Susan Skyrm (University of South Dakota) posed some interesting questions in suggesting that the finale of Haydn's Sonata in D major hXVI:51 is a parody of Scarlatti's style. The presentation included a performance of the Haydn sonata movement, a discussion of its historical context and comparisons to a selection of Scarlatti sonatas. The session concluded with a paper by Sofia Barreto (Universidad Simón Bolívar, Venezuela) on possible oral sources for the eighteenth-century performance of Spanish dances. Barreto honed in on the joropo, a popular dance form from Venezuela often called fandango. By focusing on the harmonic and structural similarities between the joropo and some Spanish dances, she made a convincing argument for the use of ‘folk’ traditions as sources of eighteenth-century performance practice, particularly regarding ornamentation, articulation and improvisation.

The third and final session of the conference was dedicated (as was the conference as a whole) to the memory of Rafael Puyana. Puyana (1931–2013) was a Colombian keyboard player who studied piano at the New England Conservatory, then harpsichord with Wanda Landowska and composition with Nadia Boulanger, making his harpsichord debut in New York in 1957 to critical acclaim. Luisa Morales, Director of FIMTE and a student of Puyana in Paris from 1979 to 1985, offered the attendees a personal account of his pedagogy, something that he took very seriously and to which (alongside performance) he dedicated the majority of his life. She demonstrated aspects of his evolving performance and teaching style by analysing his annotated scores, in which he meticulously marked phrasing, articulation and fingering. Additionally, Morales placed Puyana within the context of the then-emerging historical performance movement, citing his ground-breaking 1967 recording of the works of Antonio Soler, as well as the many concerts in which he introduced the public to the works of Antonio de Cabezón and Juan Bautista Cabanilles. It is worth mentioning that starting in 2015, readers will be able freely to consult a digital collection of Puyana's personally annotated scores at FIMTE's website (<www.fimte.org>). Egberto Bermúdez (Universidad Nacional de Colombia) complemented Luisa Morales's presentation by sketching Puyana's career through the lens of his recordings, devoting particular attention to the archival work the harpsichordist undertook at the New York Public Library to compile little-known repertoire for his groundbreaking 1962 recording The Golden Age of Harpsichord Music (Mercury SR 90304). Bermudez is currently working on a book-length biography of Puyana. Reynaldo Fernández Manzano (Centro de Documentación Musical de Andalucía, Granada), also a student of Puyana, documented Puyana's harpsichord technique through video footage, sound recordings and samples of Puyana's own scores containing his personal performance notes.

Elena García de Paredes de Falla (Archivo Manuel de Falla, Granada) spoke about another legacy of Puyana, who bequeathed a vast personal collection of books, personally annotated scores, concert programmes, musical ephemera, recordings and historical instruments to the Archivo Manuel de Falla shortly before his death. Among these last is a unique triple-manual harpsichord built in Hamburg by Hieronymus Albrecht Hass in 1740, first discovered by Wanda Landowska in Paris in 1900. This significant donation has caused the Archivo Manuel de Falla to embark on an expansion and renovation project in order to house the collection properly and to make it accessible to researchers and the public. Garía de Paredes de Falla revealed the plans for the ‘Rafael Puyana Research Wing’, which will include an archive, a research and reading room and facilities to house Puyana's instruments. Demonstrating the research potential of the collection already in place in Granada, Dácil González Mesa (Archivo Manuel de Falla and Universidad de Granada) examined the involvement of Manuel de Falla as researcher, composer, performer and concert organizer during the process of recuperating and reviving Spain's musical past. The session and symposium came to a close with an appraisal by Mariano Moisés-Azize Fernández (Archivo Manuel de Falla and Universidad de Granada) of the contents of Puyana's library and the ongoing cataloguing process. The collection is of great value to researchers concerned with the early-music movement in Spain, and with Puyana as a central figure in the revival of early Spanish keyboard music. It may be consulted at <www.manueldefalla.com/es/el-archivo>.

This brought to a close the Twelfth International Symposium on Spanish Keyboard Music ‘Diego Fernández’. Since it took place simultaneously with the International Festival of Spanish Keyboard Music, there was a varied roster of related performances every evening, in venues that ranged from the vibrant centre square of fifteenth-century Mojácar-Pueblo to a beautiful eighteenth-century castle on Garrucha's Mediterranean coast. This combination made it a great forum for scholars and performers to exchange views on this year's theme of ‘Early Music Revivals’.