About twenty researchers gathered for this international conference organized by the Center for Early Music Studies of Boston University. According to the call for papers, this event sought ‘to engage with music's relationship to the critical issues of politics, race, class, gender, and sexuality as they relate to music’ in the context of the so-called ‘discovery’ of the New World, addressing aspects such as colonialism, subalternity, slavery and the African diaspora. The conference as programmed, however, covered an even greater variety of topics.

Four papers drew on rich and hitherto unexamined resources. Javier Marín (Universidad de Jaén) studied the inventory of goods of José Laso Valero, chapelmaster in the Cathedral of Puebla, who died in 1778. Listing around 350 works that include Spanish vocal music, Italian pieces and, to a lesser extent, instrumental music, this source demonstrates the intricate musical connections of this Mexican city to the Old World towards the end of the eighteenth century. Taking a similar approach, Egberto Bermúdez (Universidad Nacional de Colombia) focused on archival documents to show how the town of El Socorro, in present-day Colombia, was the scene of a rich musical life around 1800. The repertory cultivated there derived from oral and written traditions alike and included some symphonies by Johann Anton Filtz (or Fils, 1733–1760) sent from Spain in 1798.

Instrumental music was also addressed in my paper (Alejandro Vera, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), for which I examined the shipping records preserved in the Real Aduana collection from the Archivo General de la Nación del Perú to demonstrate that this city regularly received symphonies and other instrumental pieces by later eighteenth-century composers. At the same time, however, much older works arrived, such as Gaspar Sanz's Instrucción de música (of which seven editions were published from 1674 to 1697), revealing a confluence between modernity and tradition that seems to have been typical of colonial Latin America. César Favila (University of California Los Angeles), for his part, offered a fresh overview of musical life in the convents of New Spain, showing that nuns performed several of the repertories studied at this conference. In addition, he pointed out various interesting features of convent life, such as its close contact with the supernatural world, which included religious ecstasy and demonic possessions (there was even an organ that was believed to be possessed).

Another group of papers revisited, from new perspectives, sources already known within musicology. Mary Caton Lingold (Virginia Commonwealth University) addressed the figure of ‘Mr Baptiste’, ‘the best musician of the place [Jamaica]’ according to the travel book by British naturalist Hans Sloane (1660–1753), who visited Jamaica and other Caribbean islands at the end of the seventeenth century. The documentary evidence gathered by the author suggests that Baptiste was not a European, as previously believed, but ‘a black musician and composer’. Maria Ryan (University of Pennsylvania), meanwhile, combined the study of archival documents and iconography of music scenes in Jamaica to approach the historical sounds that these sources reflect. From this perspective, aspects that usually go unnoticed when looking at paintings – such as the great distance between military musicians and violinists of African heritage – acquire a new meaning.

Ireri E. Chávez Bárcenas (Yale University) analysed four villancicos in Nahuatl from the Cancionero de Gaspar Fernández, copied at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Although, according to the author, the polyphonic style seems Spanish or European at first glance, Fernández attempts to create a ‘specifically indigenous affect’ and to retain some characteristics of the ritual and local practices (using, for instance, a more homophonic texture in the first verse in Nahuatl). Esperanza Rodríguez-García (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) reviewed the extant sources for the motet ‘O admirabile commercium’, composed around 1500. One of these is a manuscript found in Guatemala in the 1960s and currently preserved in Bloomington, which includes numerous errors in its copying that make it virtually unsingable. However, Rodríguez-García argued that this source could constitute a kind of memory aid, rather than sheet-music from which to read. Finally, a roundtable led by Grayson Wagstaff (The Catholic University of America), Rachel Carpentier (Boston University), Ryan Endris (Colgate University) and Javier Marín proposed new strategies for the study of polyphonic sources from Latin America. Two of these presentations exemplified the combination of a historical approach with an ethnographic one, resulting in more attention being paid to the cultural meaning of musical works (Wagstaff) or a focus on manuscript copies of printed works instead of analysing only the latter (Carpentier).

Revisionism also extended to mythical accounts of the origin of musical practices or traditions. Ben Curry (University of Birmingham) studied the apparent anomaly that occurs in ‘Koromanti’, one of the pieces attributed to the Jamaican-based musician Mr Baptiste, with the consecutive appearance of natural and sharp Gs. One of the previous hypotheses had related this apparent chromaticism to a blues scale, but Curry convincingly proposed that barlines should be removed from modern transcriptions, since they were probably added (by the printer) to adapt the piece to European conventions. When we do so, all these notes become G♯s, the musical phrases fit better with the text, and the hypothesis about the possible links with blues appears to be baseless. By the same token, Nicholas Gebhardt (Birmingham City University) showed that the supposed links between jazz and dances practised by Africans in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century rested on weak foundations. Instead, he proposed we should think about jazz without establishing a direct line with African music, nor with any other single point of origin. Michael Birenbaum Quintero (Boston University) undertook a similar critical exercise concerning the bambuco, a ‘national’ genre in Colombia. Previous hypotheses that attributed its origin to Africa or Europe assumed that its current performance should reflect an identifiable starting-point. Birenbaum instead suggested that this music is a local adaptation of Spanish forms, which nevertheless had enough impact among people of African heritage to be incorporated into their culture.

Francesco Milella (University of Cambridge) focused on the composer Stefano Cristiani, who was active in Mexico in the 1820s. Combining the analysis of his manuscripts and the Mexican press of the time, Milella showed that the introduction of Italian opera did not take place abruptly, but was preceded by several years in which opera coexisted with the Spanish zarzuela. Benjamin Walton (University of Cambridge) also chose the introduction of the opera as a topic, but in Rio de Janeiro. According to him, the genre was far from being a mere bearer of European culture, as frequently stated, because traditional spaces for the development of the forms of sociability characteristic of Europe were scarce in the city and because opera had to coexist with a broader universe of ‘sonic cultures’, including music by musicians with African heritage. However, if the Atlantic crossing usually appears as a unidirectional one, from the Old to the New World, David Irving (ICREA & Institució Milà i Fontanals–CSIC) analysed the natural materials used in the making of instruments to show how American woods modified the European lutherie of the time substantially. In this way, he reminded us that the cultural impacts of transatlantic exchange resounded in Europe in ways that were fundamental for the development of orchestral instruments. Notwithstanding these revisionist approaches, Sarah Eyerly (Florida State University), in her study on musical and ritual practices by Moravians in Nain, Labrador, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showed convincingly that some musical traditions could endure for a long time, even in some aspects that musicology used to consider prone to change.

Another topic addressed by more than one author was how music not only reflects the society and culture that surround it but also contributes to its shaping. Julia Hamilton (Columbia University) studied the role of abolitionist songs in Britain in the late eighteenth century. The numerous musical versions preserved for some texts suggest that poets were fully aware that music could increase the circulation and acceptance of their ideas about slavery. Guillermo Salas Suárez (Case Western University), for his part, showed that the violin constituted an effective means of social climbing in eighteenth-century Mexico and that this instrument was practised by people with diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Finally, the paper by Devon J. Borowski (The University of Chicago) showed that the sung voice contributed to outlining the notions of masculinity that were supposedly proper to the British Empire. However, vocal performance could sometimes be considered to detract from accepted standards of imperial ideology, as happened with a cantata performed in 1781, for William Beckford's birthday, in which the ‘decadent voices’ of the castratos produced a conflicting image of masculinity.

The conference also gave space to the study of music performance. Apart from the papers by Lingold and Curry mentioned above, which partly dealt with performing issues, Žak Ozmo (L'Avventura, London) and Ryan Endris addressed this field in depth. The former studied the Portuguese modinhas of the eighteenth century, a genre with Afro-Brazilian influence, which is frequently performed today in ways that seek to emphasize its supposed African origin. Ozmo, however, reminded us that the promotion of genres of this type as genuinely African was a strategy employed by black minstrels themselves to ensure their success, and that Europeans built their music by incorporating and parodying foreign languages. Endris, on the other hand, examined works by Antonio Juanas (c1762–c1816), a chapel master of Mexico Cathedral. Like other composers active in colonial Latin America, Juanas wrote music for several choirs in the concertato-ripieno format (if not strictly polychoral), something that Endris decided to reflect through piano and forte indications in his recently published edition.

The conference concluded with a paper by Brian Barone (Boston University) on music, dance and torture in the ‘Middle Passage’, that is, the part of the Atlantic through which millions of Africans were forced to pass as slaves to the New World. Based on different sources, the author showed that music was used as a means of coercion and even torture against these people. For example, a book printed in France in 1675 (Le parfait negotiant) recommended that slave traders bring some instruments so that the slaves could dance, since in that way they were kept in good health and sold at a better price upon arrival. However, those who refused to dance were tortured or, in the case of women, raped. The author concluded by asking what we could do, as musicologists, to avoid ignoring this historical reality, and also to explore its current implications.

Of course, the other side of the coin (and Barone was undoubtedly aware of this) is that a musicological narrative pointing exclusively to the damnable violence that people of African heritage experienced during European colonization can lead us to forget that, despite this, musical practices also constituted for many of them a source of pleasure and a creative experience – and were generated and invented by them for this purpose, as Maria Ryan explained in her paper. In this troubling duality, as in others, lies a fundamental problem for the study of African and African-derived practices in the Americas; this may perhaps be considered one of the lessons offered by this conference.

Another important lesson lies in the need to increase crossings between our own research fields. As Birembaum stated at the end of his presentation: although historical musicology, until recent decades, often avoided the study of musical culture in its broadest sense, ethnomusicology on the other hand tended to establish close associations between musical practices and individual cultures while paying scarce attention to their historical dimensions. While both statements could be considered unfair by many musicologists and ethnomusicologists of the past, I believe that Birembaum's observation points to the need to cross the boundaries of our comfort zone – to recover, in other words, the ability to accept the other and be enchanted by difference.

The hospitality that Victor Coelho (chair) and the organizing committee (Joshua Rifkin and Brian Barone) lavished on attendees, especially those who came from farther away, deserves special mention. Their warm welcome, the infrastructure provided by the university and the surroundings of a beautiful city like Boston made this conference a pleasant experience for everyone.