The Baroque Conference seems to have lodged itself in the United Kingdom for the time being, having been through a period of alternating British and other European Union venues. That the conference chairman Yo Tomita has established what is effectively a Bach research unit at Queen's, with close ties to the Bach-Archiv Leipzig – not to mention the gematrial significance of the number fourteen – inevitably meant that J. S. Bach would be in the forefront this time. 2010 is also the tercentenary of the birth of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, a neglected composer compared with his brother Emanuel. The keynote address by Peter Wollny (Bach-Archiv Leipzig), dedicated to Friedemann's church cantatas, alerted us to a little-known aspect of one of the most interesting, if problematical, musical minds of the eighteenth century. In a subsequent paper David Schulenberg (Wagner College) gave us a preview of his forthcoming monograph on Friedemann, amazingly the first since Martin Falck's of 1913.

The Bach-Archiv provided a special session with a progress report on their current work on Bach in the 1730s and 1740s: Bach's use of cantatas by other composers after finishing his own three cycles and his collaboration on the shadowy Picander series with his sons (Peter Wollny); a newly discovered copy of Johann Adolph Scheibe's Sendschreiben (1737), annotated with the names of all those criticized (Michael Maul); and the shift from dramma per musica to singspiel in 1740s Leipzig (Manuel Bärwald). In addition, the conference doubled as the annual Dialogue Meeting of Bach Network UK, whose chairman, Peter Smaill (Edinburgh), this year takes over from Reinhard Strohm (University of Oxford). The Network hosted a session on women's contributions to Bach's musical world and two sessions on sources, as well as introducing the project for Music and Emblematics Research, established by Robin Leaver (The Juilliard School and Queen's University Belfast). Emblems (allegorical images, symbolic figures) can tell us much about cultural perceptions of the time. Ruth Tatlow (Stockholms Universitet) presented an intriguing examination of Johann Heinrich Buttstett's emblem of a chalice of anise, printed in his final retort (1718) to his critic Johann Mattheson. Anise was a remedy for flatulence and the motto ‘Anisum’ spurred the audience into anagramatic and acrostic speculation.

There was a strand of Bach-related papers throughout each of the three days, though many were contextual studies, and therefore not entirely narrow in focus. In a survey of Christmas events in Leipzig prior to the Christmas Oratorio, Markus Rathey (Yale University) found that Christmas plays were banned in 1680 because of the perceived dangers in dressing up boys, and rocking the cradle was piously banned in 1700. Dominik Sackmann (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste) gave a useful survey of the puzzling word perfidia, meaning a figure of dogged persistence, used in the St John Passion to represent the obstinacy of the Jews in refusing to recognize Christ. Michael Dodds (University of North Carolina School of the Arts) offered a similarly hermeneutic approach to the St John Passion with his description of ars combinatoria in permutation counterpoint to represent the casting of lots for Christ's cloak, with the cello playing seamlessly throughout. Erasmo Estrada (University of Edinburgh) shed light on Bach's ‘cantable Art im spielen’, showing the deep religious resonance in the Lutheran tradition of the word Singkunst, which goes back to St Paul's injunction to sing as a part of meditation. Mary Oleskiewicz (University of Massachusetts, Boston) had new evidence that, contrary to received opinion, music of the Bach family (including the Brandenburg Concertos) was indeed played in Berlin and surrounding cities, with chamber works by Emanuel and Friedemann owned by Quantz and taught to his pupils, perhaps even to Frederick II. A group of papers focused more on source studies: Elise Crean (Queen's University Belfast) explored the implications of Kobayashi's redating of the fourteen canons bwv1087 to c1747–1748, which would therefore not be preparatory to the Goldberg Variations but belong in a group along with the ten canons of the Musical Offering. Pieter Dirksen (Culemborg) shared new thoughts about the function, origins and date of the organ sonatas, emerging from his preparation of a forthcoming edition. And Joshua Rifkin (Boston University) expressed healthy scepticism about the supposed gains from X-ray examinations of the autograph of the B minor Mass, the results of which are incorporated in the revised edition of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, but which sometimes conflict with musical intuition and information about the manuscript that can be gleaned from copies made at various times. Perhaps Rifkin's edition has not been superseded after all.

Offering still more on Bach's environment, a session oriented around Saxony-Poland was very informative: Szymon Paczkowski (Uniwersytet Warszawski) on the previously unsuspected collection of Count Flemming; Janice Stockigt (University of Melbourne) on the musicians employed at the Dresden court (with new documentation); and Steffen Voss (Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Dresden) on Pisendel's manuscripts of Italian concertos, pre-dating his sojourn in Italy of 1716–1717. Not planned as a round table, this session ended up almost as one.

The emphasis on Bach was natural given the location, but this was a large conference with around 150 delegates giving 136 papers, plus one roundtable, in four simultaneous strands throughout the three days. Of these, eighty-four papers were on eighteenth-century themes (for the purposes of this report I have rigorously excluded the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries). Bach studies can be a somewhat hermetic pursuit and I was struck several times by the benefit to speakers of having an audience that included such a broad range of experts, ever ready to correct narrow misconceptions.

Handel had three dedicated sessions, and here again Queen's University was active, with papers on the use of accompanied recitative to mark ‘the righteous’ in the oratorios (Liam Gorry) and on Handel's changed conception of opera, particularly with regard to the role of dance, with his move to Covent Garden in 1734 (Sarah McCleave); Handel and Covent Garden was the subject of a themed session. In comparison with Bach studies, it is noticeable how much discussion among Handel scholars is based on verbal texts rather than the notes.

When it came to things Italian, two papers focused on theoretical concepts: modes as a ritualistic topos in Marcello and Martini (Gregory Barnett, Rice University) and the ‘scientific’ grounding of major/minor tonality in the Paduan circle of Vallotti and Tartini, based on Euler's acoustics and Newtonian optics (Bella Brover-Lubovsky, Hebrew University of Jerusalem). Otherwise, attention centred on the diffusion of Italian music throughout Europe and by extension the New World, much of it the result of Rome-centric church influence: new sources of vocal and instrumental music in Mallorca (José María Domínguez, Universidad de Extremadura); Neapolitan partimenti in Portugal, as well as native Portuguese ones (Mário Marques Trilha, Universidade de Aveiro – one of a number of papers reflecting the current interest in partimenti and musical training based on improvisation); opera in Lisbon and Brazil (David Cranmer, Universidade Nova de Lisboa); church music in Flanders and Brabant (Stefaine Beghein, Universiteit Antwerpen – this was a summary of work already published, but probably not yet sufficiently known); Italian influence in the development of a northern Croatian musical culture (Jelena Knešaurek Carić, Sveučilište u Zagrebu – a continuation of the nationalist-sociological-statistical tradition of musicology in central and eastern Europe); Vivaldi's quirks meshing with Slav ones in the Czech lands (Robert Rawson, Canterbury Christ Church University); the rage for Vivaldi's Op. 3, particularly No. 5, in Britain (Michael Talbot, University of Liverpool); and Italian traits in French airs before the overt arrival of Italian style in French cantatas from 1705 (Don Fader, University of Alabama). The paper by Matjaž Matošec (Universiteit Utrecht) on the reputation in Britain of two castrato singers was masterly reception history delivered in exceptionally good English.

Scholarly attention to French and British music was mostly confined to seventeenth-century topics. I shall mention here just a few miscellaneous eighteenth-century subjects that may be of interest. The supposedly lost Breve summa de todas las reglas de canto llano (Antigua, 1750) of Antonio Martín y Coll has recently been rediscovered (Paul Murphy, State University of New York, Fredonia). A new set of virtuoso ornaments for Corelli's Op. 5 by the Scottish violinist William McGibbon (1696–1756) has turned up at Berkeley (Leon Chisholm, University of California, Berkeley). Johann Sigismund Cousser's commonplace book, listing music he acquired in London and Dublin, sheds light on the repertory of music at Dublin Castle in the early eighteenth century (Samantha Owens, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and University of Queensland), and an edition of Cousser's commonplace book is being considered. There is a Danish project to catalogue the works of Johann Adolph Scheibe (Peter Hauge, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen). The Neuer und sehr-curios-Musicalischer Instrumental-Calender (1748) of Haydn's Esterházy predecessor Gregor Joseph Werner is indeed curious, with proportions reflecting the length of daylight at different times of the year, among other quirks (Michael Baker, University of Kentucky) – an interesting sidelight on some of Haydn's quainter excursions.

As usual, scope and diversity characterized this conference, surveying music from China to Peru. A particular strength is the presence of younger scholars along with those of high profile. In this brief report I have been able to mention only a few things that caught my attention. Not holding the Hello-magazine philosophy that a person's work is to be evaluated by the number of times his or her name appears in print, I hope that nobody will feel neglected. The Fifteenth Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music will be held at the University of Southampton, with proposed dates of 11–15 July 2012 (a week following the Nineteenth International Musicological Society Congress in Rome). I am very grateful to Michael Talbot for contributing to this report.