The year 2014 marked the tercentenary of the birth of Christoph Gluck, an anniversary shared with his fellow operatic reformer Niccolò Jommelli and the most famous Bach son, Carl Philipp Emanuel. For most people, the mention of Gluck brings to mind his involvement in the reform of eighteenth-century opera and seminal works such as Orfeo ed Euridice, associations that have had the effect of minimizing Gluck's other accomplishments, including the majority of his dramatic oeuvre. The conference and festival Gluck and the Map of Eighteenth-Century Music, organized by Brian Locke and Anita Hardeman at Western Illinois University, focused less on Gluck's involvement in operatic reform than on the many ways in which he engaged with operatic and balletic traditions. Encompassing studies of genre, performance and reception history, the papers portrayed Gluck as a composer enmeshed in the musical culture of his time, whose works still leave much to be discovered by both scholars and performers.

Following welcoming remarks from Locke, the conference opened on Friday, 17 October with a panel on ‘Singers and Dancers’, which examined Gluck's relationship with his performers and the centrality of ballet and choreography in eighteenth-century opera. Motivated by my own experiences as a singer, my paper (Annalise Smith, Cornell University) explored the relationship between Gluck and the singers at the Paris Opéra. While the preface to Alceste, likely to have been written by Calzabigi, suggests disdain for singers and their role in ‘abusing’ opera, I argued that Gluck carefully considered the capabilities of his performers when composing his French operas, and that he recognized the role of singers in making his operas palatable to audiences. Eleanor Selfridge-Field (Stanford University) examined Gluck's relationship with Anna Girò, who frequently collaborated with Vivaldi and sang some of Gluck's early Italian opere serie. Selfridge-Field put Girò forward as representative of the kind of singer available to Gluck early in his career, and noted that theirs was a typical singer–composer relationship for the time. In a paper read by John Rice, Margaret Butler (University of Florida) discussed practices of adaptation and generic mixture in theatrical productions in Parma and Vienna. Tracing changes made to works by Rameau and Gluck, Butler discussed how such modifications could be motivated by political and aesthetic needs. Her talk provided valuable insight into the international transmission of dramatic works, and how these pieces were adapted to suit local practices. Katherine Syer (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) dug into the expressive power of dance and its frequent expansion to continuous choreography in Gluck's operas. Considering several recent productions that emphasized choreographed movement, some going so far as to make the dancers more prominent than the singers, Syer offered a compelling look at how choreography can be a means of both communicating the director's vision and making an unfamiliar operatic idiom more accessible to the audience.

As part of the festival, the Western Illinois University Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Richard Hughey, presented two gala concerts featuring the work of Gluck and his contemporaries. The first concert, on Friday night, opened with Gluck's shortened version of the ballet Don Juan and the sinfonia to L’innocenza giustificata. Gluck's ballets are eclipsed by his reform operas, but Don Juan is also representative of eighteenth-century attempts to revitalize the dramatic arts, in that it presents a comprehensive narrative without spoken or sung text. It is rare to hear Don Juan performed live, and even without any accompanying dance, the energetic performance displayed Gluck's ability to convey meaning and pathos through his orchestral writing.

The conference continued on the morning of Saturday, 18 October with ‘The Cosmopolitan Gluck’, a panel investigating the composer's ability to accommodate the tastes and practices of various European capitals. Examining Gluck's short career in London, Brian Locke discussed the pasticcio La caduta de’ giganti as a product of the city's fondness for pastiche and a response to political events in England. He made a convincing case for the pasticcio's inherent musical and dramatic qualities, but more significantly argued for the importance of pastiche in Gluck's dramatic oeuvre, challenging scholarship's tendency to neglect works that rely on borrowing. Michael Vincent (University of Florida) approached Gluck's cosmopolitanism via his ability to invoke various regional styles. Comparing the fandango in Gluck's Don Juan to that in Boccherini's String Quintet g341, Vincent argued that the composers had different perspectives on the dance and the characteristics that imbued it with its nationalistic identity. These differences point not only towards the composers’ personal styles, but also to their political identity and relationship to Enlightenment values.

As Hayoung Heidi Lee (West Chester University of Pennsylvania) demonstrated, practical considerations such as employment often took precedence over artistic motivations. Examining Le cinesi, Gluck's audition piece for the Habsburg court, Lee argued that the composer carefully tailored the piece to Empress Maria Theresa's taste for chinoiserie. Flipping normal dramatic conventions by presenting Europe as the exotic and desirable Other, the one-act opera nevertheless conforms to the norms of eighteenth-century exoticism. Yet clear correlations can be drawn between the work and Maria Theresa's collection of oriental art at Schönbrunn palace. Taking us to Vienna, Paris and Stockholm, John Rice (independent scholar) provided a glimpse into the lives of three women who compared their own amorous intrigues with Gluck's operatic depiction of Orpheus. In addition to provoking the most laughter of any paper at the conference – one woman's identification of her lover, opium and Gluck's operas as the three great pleasures in her life became the eighteenth-century equivalent of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll – Rice's compelling narrative demonstrated the appeal of Gluck's operas throughout Europe, and how they engaged with the cult of eighteenth-century sentimentality.

The keynote address, ‘Near and Far with Gluck and Ditters’ by Bruce Alan Brown (University of Southern California), revisited several issues raised in other papers and honed in on what became the central theme of the conference: a desire for scholarship to move beyond the pervasive idea of reform. Brown explored this topic by focusing on Gluck's travels with Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, whose records of these travels provide a narrative of Gluck's activities in Italy and allow us to examine his compositional practices prior to his Viennese engagement with Durazzo and Calzabigi. Brown offered a rallying-cry for scholars to approach Gluck's music at face value instead of applying pre-conceived notions about what his music was meant to accomplish or ‘reform’ based on when it was written.

Both papers in the following session, ‘Gluck and Drama’, took up the call to re-evaluate the idea of reform in Gluck's operas. Looking at the first act of the oft-overlooked Telemaco (1765), Michele Cabrini (Hunter College) argued that its stylistic mixture of reform and opera-seria styles can be read as representative of the emotional state of each character and their role in the plot's conflict. From such a viewpoint, Telemaco is not a failure on Gluck's part to reconcile his pre- and post-reform styles, but a deliberate attempt to use music to adumbrate the central conflicts in the opera. Kurt Markstrom (University of Manitoba) acknowledged and emphasized Gluck's role in the creation of reform opera, but also discussed how the composer's efforts to make accompanied recitative more effective grew from the practices of earlier composers, drawing on Algarotti's observations of accompanied recitative in Vinci's Didone.

Saturday evening's concert, an all-Gluck programme, featured the premiere of a reconstruction of Gluck's pasticcio La caduta de’ giganti, with several arias taken from other operas. Accompanying the pasticcio were the sinfonias to Ipermestra and Telemaco. Beautifully sung by a cast of Western Illinois University students and young professionals, the performance of La caduta allowed the audience a rare opportunity to hear Gluck's pre-reform operatic style, the arias delightfully awash with florid vocal writing, ornamentation and cadenzas. A listener more accustomed to the style of Orfeo or Alceste might have found the lengthy arias incongruous with their perception of Gluck, yet it is this very dichotomy that exemplifies the need for a full exploration of Gluck's oeuvre. Works such as La caduta are just as important to our understanding of Gluck as those from later in his career. Congratulations are owed to Locke, whose selection and arrangement of the music made the work a highlight of the festival.

In exploring Gluck's music and influence throughout Germany, the papers in the conference's final session addressed the lasting impact of early German scholarship on current conceptions of Gluck and the music of his time. Having previously unearthed the first half of a thematic catalogue of Count Sickingen's music collection, Paul Corneilson (Packard Humanities Institute) shared his recent discovery of the catalogue's second half. In addition to containing several of Gluck's works, the catalogue demonstrates Sickingen's interest in operatic reform more generally. The collection not only offers valuable insight into how musical works circulated in the eighteenth century, but, given Mozart's relationship with Sickingen, also suggests which of Gluck's works the younger composer might have known early in his career. As demonstrated by Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University), the circulation of scores played a crucial role in the early German reception of Gluck's operas. Most critics in the late eighteenth century did not have the opportunity to see live performances of Gluck's works, and their critiques relied primarily on score analysis. As a result, German critical discourse focused more on instrumental and contrapuntal aspects of composition, rather than on matters of embodied performance – a trend that established much of the later rhetoric surrounding Gluck's operas. In the final paper of the conference, Eric Schneeman (Northeast Lakeview College) detailed the efforts of Johann Friedrich Reichardt to alter the negative perception of Gluck in Berlin. Drawing on the philosophies of Kant, Reichardt's defence of Gluck had a profound impact on the perceptions of nineteenth-century critics such as A. B. Marx and E. T. A. Hoffman. Not only did Reichardt's writings raise Gluck's reputation as a composer, but they also inspired future generations of composers to consider Gluck's defiance of compositional rules as inspiration for escaping the bounds of artistic expectation.

Those in attendance at the conference were inspired to redraw the map of Gluck scholarship and embrace a more pluralistic view of the composer's entire oeuvre. As scholarship in this vein progresses, Gluck should increasingly be understood as a composer fully active within and appreciative of the musical cultures of his time, and just as willing to self-borrow and engage with his performers as he was to reform the dramatic aspect of opera. For young scholars, the present author included, it was an invaluable opportunity to hear high-calibre scholarship on a topic that still offers much opportunity for future study.