In July 2005 many of the leading scholars of classical music met in Sulzburg. Although the name ‘Sulzburg’, when used in connection with devotees of Mozart, looks like an obvious misprint, it is not. The town shares with Salzburg a history of salt mines (Salz or Sulz) and picture-postcard images of rustic elegance in the Alpine piedmont, but it lies in the southwest corner of Germany. It offers a more contemplative environment – away from the tourist throngs in Mozart's city – and possesses at Bad Sulzburg the type of mineral springs that have long attracted travellers from afar. The workshop held at this spa was entitled ‘Communicative Strategies in Music of the Late Eighteenth Century’, and from that gathering ten of the participants were able to formalize their presentations for inclusion in this volume.

The focus of the book is clearly on music in late eighteenth-century Vienna. Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn are the central characters, with J. S. Bach and the nations of France, Italy and England playing minor roles or serving as scenery. Given the history of books such as these, which have their roots in Victorian demonstrations of the formal superiority of ‘pure’ German music over the shallow sensuousness of French and Italian music, one might have expected quite a dull collection of articles. Based on the experience of this reviewer, however, this is not the case at all. The articles are quite lively, very contemporary and representative of a wide range of viewpoints.

The two editors have each provided a short essay that serves as a prelude (Mirka) and a postlude (Agawu) to the volume. In between, they have grouped the ten articles into three broad areas: (1) Communication and the Market, (2) Musical Grammar and (3) Rhetorical Form and Topical Decorum. Although these topics are broad and probably after-the-fact, rather like the titles of sessions at large conferences, one does sense their appropriateness.

The editors are to be lauded for inviting a specialist in the theory of communication, Paul Cobley, to lead off with the first article. In music studies we often hear the work of such specialists filtered through the voices of their advocates within the tribe of academic musicians. Here the tables are turned, as Cobley comments on the studies found elsewhere in this volume by the various music scholars. He begins with a précis of communication studies and the important issues in that field, stating that a founding paradigm of communication theory, one applied first to literature (1920s) and later to digital circuits (1940s), was Sender → Message → Receiver (15). He notes that recently, in literary studies, a more nuanced paradigm has emerged: Real Author → Implied Author → Narrator → (Narratee) → Implied Reader → Real Reader (16).

While it may be relatively easy to fit an eighteenth-century epistolary novel into this scheme, say Richardson's Clarissa, the challenge of applying the same scheme to Pergolesi's Stabat Mater or to one of Haydn's baryton trios can be formidable. And yet the readers and listeners of that age must have shared many modes of behaviour and suppositions about the role and purpose of entertainments, whether read or heard. Similarly stimulating and worthy of exploration is Cobley's proposal of ‘verisimilitude’ as a central concept of eighteenth-century communication. In his formulation, verisimilitude enables a sender to encode a message in such a way that it can be transmitted through the conventions of a genre and then decoded by a receiver. It is the quality of ‘probability, likelihood; resemblance of truth’ (the definition of ‘verisimilitude’ in Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed by W. Strahan, for J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755)) that seems to have formed a constituent of ‘social truth’.

Cobley notes that understanding communication in the ‘public sphere’ (18) requires an understanding of how the public ‘reads’ messages. This focus on the public, and the listening public in particular, forms the subject of Mark Evan Bonds's ‘Listening to Listeners’, the second article in this section. With a well-chosen selection of historical quotations pertaining to Mozart, Haydn, Pleyel, Cherubini, C. P. E. Bach and other important composers of the day, Bonds lays out the practical concerns of composers who were attempting to navigate the new commercial world of musical print culture. Composers appear to have been quite cognizant of fashion, mass taste, elite taste and the needs of their consumers as they could envisage them. Some, like C. P. E. Bach (who served as his own publisher), could rely on sales figures for objective feedback. Others, like Mozart, tried to imagine what the market might be. Letters from Mozart's father suggest that Wolfgang's imagination failed to conjure up the actual consumers to whom he might have redirected his art. As Bonds points out, many of these documents hint at what was to become a characteristic divide between highbrow and lowbrow culture in the later era of fully commercialized art (47).

Near the beginning of Cobley's essay is a discussion of Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy and how passages that were intended to be funny – an effect sometimes lost on the modern reader – depend on a ‘context-specific configuration of humor and departure from convention, referring to contemporary writing and likely to be recognized as such by its contemporary audience’ (13). The third article in this volume takes up a musical equivalent of these same issues, the contemporary reception and analysis of a Beethoven piano sonata, Op. 31 No. 1 (1802–1803). Claudia Maurer Zenck advances the fascinating thesis that Beethoven, responding to a request to publish ‘substantial, brilliant, virtuosic, and formally unusual’ (55) sonatas for a series issued by the Swiss publisher Nägeli, composed the first sonata of Op. 31 in the persona of a bungling composer who makes a number of humorous compositional gaffes. The idea may seem far-fetched at first, but Maurer Zenck advances a great deal of evidence supporting her thesis. Moreover, the argument fits nicely within the communicative scheme mentioned by Cobley, where there is an overt author (composer) who creates a fictive persona (the bungler) who then violates a number of artistic codes known to the intended reader (audience). Maurer Zenck helps us imagine ourselves as one of Beethoven's listeners, and helps us understand how such a listener might have construed musical humour.

Part 2 of this volume is entitled ‘Musical Grammar’, as I have mentioned, though the word ‘grammar’ may give a false impression of the actual content. To speak of grammar is usually to point out types of ungrammatical usage, thus to contrast right and wrong. The three authors in this section are more concerned with describing different nuances of correct usage. Danuta Mirka in the first paper and William Rothstein in the second both discuss metre. Mirka's focus is directed towards the aural cues that indicate different metrical levels (for example, a perceived 2/4 versus 4/4). The eighteenth-century German theorists Riepel and Koch are full partners in this discussion, and six music examples from their treatises illuminate ten beautiful passages drawn from Haydn string quartets and Mozart string quintets. It would be necessary to reproduce all sixteen examples in order to give the full flavour of this fascinating colloquy between Mirka in the present and these voices from the past.

Rothstein, in exploring ‘national metrical types’, offers over thirty examples selected from a broad range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers and theorists. If Mirka focuses on cues from usage, Rothstein focuses on dialect, positing a Franco-Italian metre distinct from German metre. Again, without reproducing the evidence it is difficult to convey the quality of the exposition and the important implications such a bifurcation might have for historical studies of rhythm and metre. Readers who might wish to test these hypotheses could turn to Carl Ditters's Sinfonia nazionale nel gusto di cinque nazioni (Wellington: Artaria Editions, 1996). Each of the five nations (cinque nazioni), meaning the cultures of those who spoke English, French, German, Turkish and Italian, is portrayed in a movement or major section, and in the rondo finale a German ritornello connects episodes in which the foreigners take centre stage in turn. The German ritornello does resemble ‘German melodies im Volkston’ (115), while the episodes of the different nations clearly alter the perceived metre. The musically portrayed ethnic stereotypes sketched by Ditters offer clues to what he considered to be salient features of each national ‘taste’ (gusto). The syntax of all the nations can be traced to Italian models, but it is through melodic gestures, characteristic rhythms and metrical organization that Ditters imposes the desired distinctions.

William Caplin's study of the melodic characteristics and implications of bass lines, the third contribution to ‘Musical Grammar’, builds on the eighteenth-century truism that one learns multi-voice music from the bass up. That could mean something as simple as basic lessons in thoroughbass or something as elaborate as professional training in the improvisation of complete compositions from the cue of a given bass (what the Italians termed partimento). Caplin weaves together elements of the implication–realization theory of Meyer and Narmour with a focus on longer-range harmonic goals. The result is a sophisticated analysis of the meanings communicated to listeners through the agency of a finely crafted bass.

‘Rhetorical Form and Topical Decorum’ is the puzzling title of this volume's third and final section. One might have hoped to meet, at least briefly, an indecorous topic, but much of this section focuses on ‘meaning’, that most difficult of subjects to pin down when the message is music. Michael Spitzer, Kofi Agawu and Lawrence Zbikowski, authors of three of the four essays in this section, seek musical meaning down quite different paths, though they are all conversant with post-1960s literary theory. Spitzer finds a metaphorical connection between the first and second themes of Mozart sonatas, with the second theme a type of ‘second glance’ at aspects of the first (190). Meaning thus emerges from a confrontation between two glances, between two presentational forms of a common message. For Agawu, meaning likewise emerges from tensions between two ‘readings’ that ‘are at once autonomous and complementary’ (230). One is a paradigmatic analysis (Ruwet, Nattiez) of small compositional models that support the concatenation of phrases in the first movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in D major, Op. 18 No. 3. The other is a topical analysis (Ratner) of the series of references in this same quartet to extramusical associations or to known musical types (230). For Zbikowski, this same tension or confrontation exists between dynamic processes in the world (for example, dance) and the musical analogues to them constructed by composers (such as waltzes or minuets). All three essays combine great sensitivity to the music with an admirable openness towards the manifold diversity and subjectivity of musical meaning.

Standing apart from these more earnest efforts is the wonderfully witty contribution of Wye Allanbrook: ‘Mozart's k331, First Movement: Once More, with Feeling’. The opening of this well-known Sonata in A major, a staple of the tyro pianist, has been subjected to analysis by more authors than perhaps any other, and in almost every case the analyses have viewed the piece out of time and place – as a ‘structure’. Allanbrook successfully argues that time and place matter, that the subtle rhythm and metre that have perplexed the analysts simply represent a garden-variety siciliano, and that extramusical associations are not at all external to a work. If one is looking for a short, well-written article by which to introduce bright students to the potentials and pitfalls of music analysis, this is it.

While it would have been a delight to attend the original conference, interspersing lectures with sessions at the mineral baths, we who were not there can console ourselves by reading this lovingly prepared volume of essays. The two editors have done a fine job of showcasing some of the most interesting voices in music scholarship today. Over the years, the sprightly, optimistic music of the late eighteenth century has fallen victim to some very dull analysis. Here, by contrast, lively ideas meet lively music, with a satisfying result.