Since its inception in 2005, the J. S. Bach Dialogue Meeting has become a vital platform for Bach scholars from around the globe not only to share their ideas, insights and discoveries but, perhaps more importantly, to voice unresolved issues and nagging questions, and to generate an open-minded discussion within a sympathetic and supportive environment. The participatory concept whereby each delegate's contribution is considered equally important – whether or not they are presenting a paper – is what distinguishes the Dialogue Meeting from a conventional academic conference. The magnificent Madingley Hall, a secluded and tranquil countryside mansion situated just outside Cambridge, provided the perfect backdrop for this year's event. Following an enthusiastic welcome by Ruth Tatlow (Musik- och teaterbibliotek, Statens Musikverk, Stockholm) on behalf of the programme committee, council and trustees of Bach Network UK, under the aegis of which the Dialogue Meetings are held, a diverse range of topics unfolded over the ensuing three days.

The opening session took off from the broad perspective of global Bach research, with Reinhard Strohm's (University of Oxford) overview of a three-year programme under his direction, funded by the International Balzan Foundation (Milan/Zurich) and entitled ‘Towards a Global History of Music’. Strohm's concise report was a fitting introduction for Tobias Klein's (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) case study, which illustrated the interdependent colonial and postcolonial elements in African Bach reception; initially a vehicle of instruction, Bach's music has migrated into the native idiom and transcended its original aesthetic to evolve into what Klein aptly described as ‘not yet absolute’. Bach with a difference was the focus of the lecture-recital ‘Enhancing the Spectacular: Busoni on Bach's Goldberg Variations’ by Chiara Bertoglio (Università di Roma Tor Vergata). Despite today being widely accepted as an important testament to a past ethos in performance practice, Busoni's arrangement of Bach's masterwork, with its radical interventions into Bach's text, still tends to arouse mixed feelings of amazement, bewilderment and amusement, whether one leans towards the purist or the more liberal side. One thing, however, is certain: Bertoglio's passionate and authoritative rendition of Busoni's Goldbergs affirmed it as an accomplished and compelling artwork in its own right, and made for a gratifying conclusion to the day.

Drawing on his experiences as a seasoned performer and scholar, John Butt (University of Glasgow), in conversation with Yo Tomita (Queen's University Belfast), Michael Marissen (Swarthmore College and New York City) and Bettina Varwig (King's College London), pored over some ‘Principles of Performance Lost and Gained’ – in particular, Bach's approach to tempo and tempo relationships in The Well-Tempered Clavier and recorded reconstructions of historical contexts for Bach's sacred works. The Young Scholars’ Forum, a venue at which I once greatly benefitted from the opportunity to pitch the earliest fruits of my research, included memorable contributions by Thomas Cressy (Tokyo University of the Arts), who offered us some insightful revelations about the still under-researched area of Japanese Bach reception, and Andrew Frampton (University of Melbourne), who identified the copyist (Bach's pupil Johann Friedrich Agricola) of a mass by Jan Dismas Zelenka housed in the Bodleian Library. Kaoru Matsubara (University of Tokyo) brought to our attention some ambiguities and complexities in the writings of Johann Mattheson as she juxtaposed the concept of Symphoniurgie (Mattheson's term for counterpoint) with notions of counterpoint propounded in other eighteenth-century musical treatises. Bradley Brookshire (Purchase College, New York) assessed the role of the Swiss pianist, piano pedagogue and conductor Edwin Fischer in establishing standard strategies of Bach pianism and asked how the influence of others could be evaluated in relation to Fischer. Maria Borghesi (Università di Pavia) examined Italian instructive editions of Bach's two-part inventions published between c1870 and 1985 to determine their influence on each other and on the formation of performance traditions.

In the first of Thursday afternoon's slots we welcomed colleagues from Leipzig, whose latest findings could be summed up under the theme of ‘tracing Bach's social network’. Bernd Koska's (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) presentation was based on a systematic search for sources relating to the life paths of the 309 boys who sang in the St Thomas Choir during Bach's tenure. Koska looked into the lives of those boys who later became professional musicians and therefore may have maintained links with their former cantor. While the former choirboys may have owned and performed Bach's music, it by no means dominated their repertoires. Christine Blanken (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) added fresh insights into the activities of Christoph Birkmann, a student of Leipzig University who published a 1728 collection of cantata texts entitled Gottgeheiligte Sabbaths-Zehnden (Sunday Tithes Devoted to God). Of the texts matching those used by Bach, Birkmann wrote at least eight. Blanken's research into Birkmann's Stammbuch, a notebook filled by friends and acquaintances with poetry, adages and the like, may shed more light on Bach's network of associates, reveal hitherto unknown names of Bach's students and provide handwriting samples to compare against those of yet-unidentified Bach copyists.

The discussion of cantatas continued into in the next Dialogue Session, with Tatiana Shabalina's (St Petersburg State Conservatory) example-laden scrutiny of revisions in manuscripts of parodied cantatas suggesting that in some instances the scribes themselves carried out parody procedures under Bach's supervision. Peter Smaill (Edinburgh) considered the roles of Prince Albert and his wife Queen Victoria in transmitting and popularizing the chorale in England, given their German heritage, Albert's contact with Mendelssohn and his friendship with the German ambassador and chorale enthusiast Christian Karl Josias, Baron von Bunsen. Stephen Rose (Royal Holloway, University of London) contemplated the tension between creativity and censorship in the Lutheran cantata – that is, between the needs of cantors to perform their own compositions and the mandate of church authorities to propagate music that would inspire modest and pious behaviour rather than showcase the individualistic whims of cantors.

Sessions of the final day were devoted to contextual Bach research, Bach's musical texts and new online resources for Bach scholarship. From the furthermost contextual study by Samantha Owens (Victoria University of Wellington) on the widely travelled music director and composer John Sigismond Cousser, we moved a step closer to Bach's milieu with Janice B. Stockigt's (University of Melbourne) survey of organists of Leipzig's royal Catholic chapel, which explored possible cooperation between Lutheran and Catholic musicians active in the city. Szymon Paczkowski (Uniwersytet Warszawski) then took us to Dresden, which Bach visited on occasion, and apprised us of the musical patronage of General August Christoph von Wackerbarth and Marshall Jacob Heinrich von Flemming, two leading political figures at the Dresden court in the first half of the eighteenth century. Dialogue in the truest sense followed Gergely Fazekas's (Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Egyetem, Budapest) somewhat contentious postulation that the symbiosis of music and text in the late baroque was not as strong as music history textbooks tend to suggest. Fazekas deftly illustrated his argument with the example of the fifth movement of the cantata Gelobet seist du Jesu Christ (bwv91), in which a purely musical idea, reflected in the movement's perfect formal symmetry, was more important to Bach than accurate representation of the text. In attempting to discredit what he considered a motley assortment of almost arbitrary practices that has prevailed in the preparation of critical editions, such as those of Bach's cello suites, Zoltán Szabó (University of Sydney) proposed a set of more robust yet workable criteria to which an edition should conform in order to justify its denotation as ‘critical’. He demonstrated the implementation of these criteria in the form of a customizable electronic edition, which in the ensuing discussion was hailed as the way forward for critical editions.

In the final session of the meeting Yo Tomita, Christine Blanken and Christiane Hauptmann (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) introduced new online resources at the disposal of Bach scholars – Bach Digital and Bach Bibliography – and revealed ideas for future projects, including databases of persons, printed librettos and editions, a catalogue of watermarks and another of manuscripts. After a lively round-up, at which the participants shared their visions for future Dialogue Meetings and the Bach Network UK, and it was announced that the next Dialogue Meeting in 2017 would be held in Budapest, participants were taken to the city of Cambridge to savour ‘A Bach Celebration’ at King's College Chapel, featuring three of Bach's cantatas (bwv132, 165, 185), his Suite No. 1 in C major (bwv1066) and the Violin Concerto in E major (bwv1042), all masterfully performed by the Dunedin Consort directed by John Butt.