Given the sheer scale and extent of musical activity undertaken in the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one could be forgiven for remarking that the gulf between music then and history now has rarely been so wide. This is in spite of a continuous seam of scholarship attached to this repertory which began with the publication of Ludwig Ritter von Köchel's studies of the Imperial Chapel in Vienna and of Johann Joseph Fux in 1869 and 1872 respectively (Die Kaiserliche Hof-Musikkapelle in Wien von 1543–1867 (Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1869; reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1976), Johann Josef Fux, Hofcompositor und Hofkapellmeister der Kaiser Leopold I., Josef I und Karl VI von 1698 bis 1740 (Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1872; reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1988)). Even today, Vienna and its musical satellites in the baroque period make a much less prominent appearance than ought to be the case in general histories of European music. The music of the Austro-Italian Baroque, for all its tantalizing engagement with absolutism, Counter-Reformation propaganda and political servitude, has not received the cultural history it deserves.

The richness of this music – its stylistic and generic diversity, its embodiment of extramusical ideas (above all, perhaps, the Pietas Austriaca) and its astonishing dissemination across Europe – was the focus of a recent conference on sacred music in the Habsburg Empire organized by Tassilo Erhardt (Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg) together with Steven Saunders (Colby College, Maine), Herbert Seifert (Universität Wien) and Robert Rawson (Canterbury Christ Church University). The conference took place at the Roosevelt Academy in Middelburg in the south-west of the Netherlands.

Twenty-one papers in eight sessions (prefaced by a performance of Carissimi's Jephthe and Bertali's La strage degl'innocenti) surveyed a notably wide range of topics. Although I concentrate below on papers directly concerned with the eighteenth century (because of the context in which this report is published), I feel bound to observe at the outset that one of the distinguishing features of these proceedings was their rich engagement with the seventeenth century. In particular, papers by Andrew Weaver (The Catholic University of America), Tassilo Erhardt, Marko Deisinger (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), Erika Honisch (University of Chicago), Peter Holman (University of Leeds), Viktor Velek (Universität Wien) and Robert Rawson respectively explored sacred music as an embodiment of imperial power (expressly through the musical personification of Ferdinand III) at the end of the Thirty Years' War (Weaver); a cycle of introits by Antonio Bertali and Giovanni Felice Sances preserved in multiple sources that attest to their performance in Vienna and elsewhere in the Habsburg lands to the end of the eighteenth century (Erhardt); the role of Giuseppe Tricarico as Kapellmeister to the Empress Eleonora II in Vienna from 1657 onwards and the performance of his oratorios at the imperial court (Deisinger); music for the veneration of the Eucharist at the Prague court of Rudolf II at the outset of the Thirty Years' War and its impact on seventeenth-century musical practices in Vienna (Honisch); questions of performance practice as reflected in the corpus of late seventeenth-century sacred instrumental music (in sets of single parts rather than partbooks or scores) preserved in the Liechtenstein-Kastelcorn music library at Kromĕříž (Holman); the cult of St Wenceslas in Bohemia and Moravia and its influence on Habsburg musical culture (Velek); and the rehabilitation of Czech devotional musical practices (through the agency of the Czech language) after the Thirty Years' War, notwithstanding the more general brutality and suppression associated with the Counter-Reformation (Rawson).

The papers on eighteenth-century music were no less diverse. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Johann Joseph Fux loomed largest in these, with five papers – by Thomas Hochradner (Universität Mozarteum, Salzburg), Erick Arenas (Stanford University), Mattias Lundberg (Uppsala universitet), Albert Clement (Universiteit Utrecht) and myself (Harry White, University College Dublin) – devoted to Fux's music, theory, reception history and influence, and to the transmission of his works. (A sixth paper, by Guido Erdmann (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna), on Fux's sonate à quattro, was not delivered because its author was indisposed.) Jen-yen Chen (National Taiwan University) discussed the influence of Fux and Caldara in the promulgation of the ‘virtue’ mass in Habsburg centres beyond Vienna, situated in the context of a roundtable discussion in which Honisch's paper also featured. There were also papers on new sources for the sacred instrumental music of Gottlieb Muffat (Alison Dunlop, The Queen's University of Belfast); on the sources of Marc'Antonio Ziani's liturgical church music (Johannes Prominczel, Universität Wien); on music at the Holy Sepulchre in Viennese convents, 1690–1740 (Janet Page, University of Memphis); on the Caeciliabruderschaft and its musical repertory at St Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna (Geraldine Rohling, Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, D. C.); on the influence of Vienna on church music in Dresden in the 1720s (Gerhard Poppe, Universität Koblenz-Landau); on the transmission of Neapolitan sacred music under the Habsburgs, 1707–1734 (Claudio Bacciagaluppi, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg); on church music in Antwerp, 1650–1750 (Stefanie Beghein, Universiteit Antwerpen); and on the (re)ascribing of a Miserere mei Deus to Leopold I (Herbert Seifert).

It is difficult to convey within the confines of a short report the many-sided vigour and sense of reanimation that these papers embodied. Established scholars such as Seifert, Chen, Hochradner, Rohling, Page and Poppe responded gracefully and easily to the work of younger participants, some of whom (notably Dunlop, Prominczel, Bacciagaluppi and Beghein) rose magnificently to the challenge of refining and extending our current reception of music in the Habsburg lands, especially through the agency of source studies. Dunlop's work on Muffat, which promises a catalogue raisonée of the composer's entire output, thus belongs in apposition with the keenly awaited catalogue of the works of Johann Joseph Fux by Hochradner (forthcoming at the end of 2010). Hochradner's own presentation engagingly illustrated the complex processes of transmission by which Fux's oeuvre was created even in his own lifetime, a transmission inevitably complicated by the preponderant absence (not only in Fux's case) of autographs, and by the corresponding proliferation of institutional copies through which his music habitually survived. By contrast, Prominczel's initial research on the church music of Marc'Antonio Ziani has revealed as many as eight autograph sources for the composer's masses (out of a total of ten). As his paper made abundantly clear, Prominczel's findings promise a radical reappraisal of Ziani's hitherto rather shadowy contribution to the formation of high baroque style in Viennese church music.

Janet Page's exemplary and revealing account of music composed for Holy Week at Viennese convents combined source study and stylistic criticism to recover a repertory generally unknown even to specialists. Her documentation of some ten sepolcri by the court composer Carlo Agostino Badia, performed at the Convent of St Ursula between 1695 and 1703, significantly extends our awareness of how this genre thrived beyond the confines of the Imperial Chapel. It also throws into sharp relief the comparative neglect that composers as well known as Badia (and Antonio Caldara, for that matter) have endured as far as their work in Vienna is concerned.

The tendency to overlook Caldara in favour of Fux in conferences devoted to the Austro-Italian Baroque was obviated on this occasion by Chen's scrutiny of the ‘virtue’ masses of both composers beyond the imperial court. (Chen uses the term ‘virtue’ mass to designate a category of settings of the ordinary which (a) can be grouped together because of their similar titles, all of which emphasize a religious or moral virtue (as in Missa charitatis or Missa humiliatis) and (b) are written in a notably restrained or ‘objective’ style, by comparison with the more exuberant manner of festal masses.) Through recent archival research, Chen has shown that the corporate nature of such masses (many of which are preserved in contemporary copies at St Vitus' Cathedral in Prague) fortifies and refines F. W. Riedel's notion of a Reichstil. Riedel explores this concept of a ‘dynastic style’ in his Kirchenmusik am Hofe Karls VI (Salzburg and Munich: Katzbichler, 1977), suggesting that it supervened individual considerations of compositional technique. Chen indeed concludes that the ‘virtue’ masses of Fux and Caldara were governed by a deliberately fostered ‘depersonalized idiom’. Such a conclusion has important ramifications for our more general reception of style and idiom in the vast enterprise of musical production throughout the Austro-Italian Baroque. Chen's approach to the question of compositional voice in these works by Fux and Caldara harmonizes with my own exposition of a theory of musical culture appropriate to the Austro-Italian Baroque in relation to other centres of musical production. My own paper outlined a monograph in progress (entitled ‘The Musical Discourse of Servitude’) which seeks to understand Fux in relation to Bach, and notions of imaginative servitude in relation to imaginative autonomy.

Fux and Caldara also figured as equal partners (so to speak) in Geraldine Rohling's excellent address on the formation and musical practices of the Cecilian Bruderschaft established under their leadership, initially at the Michaelerkirche in Vienna in 1725. She argued that the Bruderschaft expressly promoted the notion of an ‘imperial style of music’, one which was incorporated into the music for the First Vespers of St Cecilia in 1726, which she has recently reconstructed.

Albert Clement's thoughtful and witty address on the reception of Fux's music theory within Bach's circle (in which he gently but decisively disposed of the recent suggestion that the Mass in B minor was written for Vienna (!)) was paired with a compelling scrutiny of the Gradus ad Parnassum by Mattias Lundberg. Lundberg vividly juxtaposed Fux's striking departures from Palestrina with his reliance elsewhere on practices that long precede the sixteenth century. Of course the reformulation of ‘Palestrina style’ has been long acknowledged in studies of Fux's music theory, but Lundberg's analysis of voice leading, cadence formation, melodic structure, points of imitation and harmonic sonority in the Gradus was impressively underpinned by an adroit command of sixteenth-century (and earlier) music theory and also by a sympathetic approach to Fux as a composer as well as a theorist.

There was much else to confirm the healthy condition of research into music in the Habsburg Dominions in this conference: Gerhard Poppe's characteristically acute disclosure of the difference between conventional reception history and more recent research in his account of the Dresden court and the relative (as distinct from absolute) importance of Vienna in the formation of a self-standing church music there; Claudio Bacciagaluppi's initial investigation into the migration of Neapolitan music (and musicians) to Prague and the Austrian Netherlands (which relies on a number of archival sources little explored to date); Stefanie Beghein's account of church music in Antwerp (especially from 1715 onwards), with its likewise fascinating disclosure of the contribution made by musicians from Brussels, Amsterdam, Liège and Mainz; Erick Arenas's thoughtful discussion of (once again) an ‘imperial-liturgical’ style of church music in relation to Fux's influence in Vienna on composers later in the century, including Michael Haydn; and last, but by no means least, Herbert Seifert's patient and scholarly engagement with the ‘composing Emperors’, which leads him to restore the authorship of a major composition, the Miserere mei Deus, to Leopold I, a work which had for so long been attributed to his son, Charles VI. In this endeavour, Seifert finds himself in agreement (albeit for different reasons) with Guido Adler.

The edited proceedings of this conference will be published by the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften at the end of 2010.