The fifteenth biennial International Conference on Baroque Music was hosted by the Music Department of the University of Southampton. This conference has in the past been a wonderful meeting place for scholars and scholar-performers, senior and junior, and this year's event continued the tradition. It was especially nice to connect and reconnect with colleagues from all over the world – there were delegates from some twenty countries. The one hundred and fifty papers and lecture-recitals, filling three days (12–14 July), were organized into coherent sessions by Valeria De Lucca (University of Southampton). Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century topics were about equally represented, but even with the help of several colleagues I was unable to get a first-hand report of every eighteenth-century paper among four parallel sessions. It is clear that music of the baroque era continues to generate lively interest.

A number of sessions were dedicated to the best-known composers of the era, Bach, Handel and Rameau. Six sessions were devoted to Bach and his musical environment, four of these sponsored by the Bach Network UK. Among the highlights was the paper by Robin Leaver (Yale University/Queen's University, Belfast), ‘The Organist Encounters the Hymnologist: J. S. Bach and J. C. Olearius in Arnstadt’, in one of the conference's first sessions. The network of theologians and churchmen within which Bach found himself in the early years of the eighteenth century provided the young composer with an ‘unparalleled opportunity’ to explore the Lutheran chorale. Further papers in this session were given by Russell Stinson (Lyon College), who provided an enlightening exploration of Bach's variation technique and its north German roots, and by Ruth Tatlow (Danderyd, Sweden), whose paper was a fascinating but controversial take on numerical relationships among the Neumeister Chorales, and between them and other works. Other Bach sessions were devoted to ‘Sources and Performance’, ‘Bach and the Magnificat’, ‘Nineteenth-Century Bach Reception’ and ‘Approaches to Bach’. The latter dealt with musical practices of Bach's time and included a paper by Charles Medlam (London Baroque) on the background to Bach's cello suites. Bach, according to Medlam, was the first to see the potential of the instrument as a vehicle for the French suite, a type of music perhaps brought to Germany by Ernst Christian Hesse, who studied viol playing in Paris and lived for a time in Eisenach. Medlam provided yet another perspective on the question of what instrument Bach had in mind.

Handel sessions were devoted to ‘Handel's Dramatic Music’ and ‘Sources and Performance’. A short session on Rameau contained papers by Rémy-Michel Trotier (Université de Paris-Sorbonne), on ‘Stage Music and Musical Staging’ in Rameau's tragédies en musique, and Raphaëlle Legrand (Université de Paris-Sorbonne), on ‘Jean-Philippe Rameau and the Musico-Dramatic Structures of French Opera’. Trotier's discussion of the numerous short instrumental pieces in Hippolyte et Aricie and other works provided considerable insight into the staging of these works, revealing that Rameau employed these pieces to regulate the stage action.

A session devoted to Jan Dismas Zelenka included two outstanding papers. Jóhannes Ágústsson (Reykjavik) painstakingly reconstructed Zelenka's sizable and diverse collection of secular vocal music, which appears to have included hundreds of arias from operas and cantatas. This paper shed much new light on the composer, generally considered to have concentrated on church music. The collection may have been used or assembled between 1729 and 1734, when Zelenka was acting Kapellmeister at the Dresden court. Janice B. Stockigt (University of Melbourne) re-evaluated common assumptions about Zelenka, generally considered an isolated figure at the Saxon court whose activity focused on church music. She showed this composer to have been a member of a small inner circle of respected and trusted people who served Maria Josepha (Electress of Saxony, Queen of Poland). Stockigt also mentioned Ágústsson's recent discovery among the manuscripts of the former Saxon Hofkapelle in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek–Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB) of a violin concerto with strong Vivaldian characteristics. The work may well be by the violinist Francesco Maria Cattaneo, who in 1755 became concertmaster at the Saxon court. He may have studied with Vivaldi before moving to Germany.

One thread running through the conference concerned the lives, careers and status of musicians. Barbara Reul (Luther College, University of Regina) examined the meaning and application of the trumpeters' privilege at the court of Anhalt-Zerbst, contributing another piece to the puzzle of the use and status of brass players in the eighteenth century. Alison J. Dunlop (Don Juan Archiv Wien), in a session on ‘Court, Church and Convent in Vienna and Salzburg’, discussed what can be gleaned about Viennese court musicians' lives from wills, probate documents and death and burial records. Particularly notable is the irregularity of payments, which left many ordinary musicians in debt. This preliminary study shows much promise for rounding out the biographies of Viennese court musicians and understanding their world. A complementary paper, but dealing with the seventeenth century, by Gregory S. Johnston (University of Toronto), was entitled ‘“He Subsists Like a Sow in a Pig-Sty”: Court Musicians and Strategic Debt in Seventeenth-Century Germany’.

Two papers on singers dealt with their public personas. Alison DeSimone (University of Michigan) examined singers' attempts in eighteenth-century London to define their musical personalities and advertise their status and talents through choice of repertoire and collaborators. Anne Desler (University of Glasgow) spoke on the traces of their performance skills that singers left in works written by or for them. Focusing on Farinelli, she analysed the content of passagework sung by him, and concluded that music for such singers must be considered as co-authored.

The dissemination of music was another thread running through several sessions. An outstanding paper by Samantha Owens (University of Queensland) discussed J. S. Cousser's activities as collector and disseminator of music. The composer's commonplace book (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) contains more than five hundred names of contacts and practical information on travel, providing much insight into just how, and how much, music travelled from place to place. Dublin, where Cousser lived and worked for many years, has been considered a musical outpost, but it was in fact a major port and trade centre, and Cousser was able to receive music from all over Europe and to disseminate his own through a network of postmasters and merchants spread across the continent.

Musical instruments and performance practices also received attention. A session on stringed instruments offered two papers on the lute in the mid-eighteenth century, extending the instrument's performing life past the time of Silvius Leopold Weiss. Tim Crawford (Goldsmiths, University of London) discussed the use of the lute in Leipzig, first in J. S. Bach's circle, then as an accompanying instrument into the 1760s. A prominent figure was Luise Gottsched, wife of the poetry professor, who studied with Weiss and owned a large collection of music, including a copy of the Bach partitas and much music by Weiss. Jana Frankovà (Université de Paris-Sorbonne/Masarykova univerzita) re-evaluated the career of the lutenist Joseph Kohaut (c1736–1777), based on newly uncovered sources. In another session, Richard Boardman (University of Southampton) presented ‘The Inner World of Bressan: Exploring an Eighteenth-Century Recorder Using CT [Computed Tomography] Techniques’, a paper unusual for this conference in being entirely scientific and hi-tech in method. The images, fascinating in themselves, reconstructed the original bore profile of the Bressan treble recorder in the Bate Collection (Oxford) and allowed an estimation of the distortion that has taken place over the instrument's history, leading to some profound questions about choices that players and makers must make. A paper relating to the history of the cello, by Michael Talbot (University of Liverpool), examined the life of Jacob Cervetto. Both he and his son exerted an important influence on cello playing in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.

Several papers spread throughout the conference dealt with music in female convents and institutions. From my own perspective, I could have wished that these papers were in sessions together, but I can also understand the impulse to schedule them according to their cultural-linguistic contexts. In one of two sessions on ‘Naples under the Viceroys’, Angela Fiore (Université de Fribourg) presented preliminary work on music in Neapolitan female cloisters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This promises to be a rich study. The session ‘Music in France in Church and in the Convent’ included papers by Deborah Kauffman (University of North Colorado) on Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers's plain-chant musical motets at Saint-Cyr and by Thierry Favier (Université de Poitiers) on music and culture at the Parisian convent of the Augustines of the Assumption. The former explored Nivers's motets for the girls and women of the royal school at Saint-Cyr. These were composed in a simpler style to accommodate the performers and remained in the repertory after Nivers's time, adapted to changed tastes. The location of the Convent of the Assumption, in a prestigious neighbourhood, together with its fine music, made it one of the places to visit in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Paris. My own paper (Janet K. Page, University of Memphis) considered several anonymous scores, including one that may be an unknown work by Carlo Agostino Badia written for the Ursuline Convent in Vienna.

That ‘baroque’ music extended well into the eighteenth century was demonstrated by Dominique Lauvernier's (Université de Caen) reconstruction of the process of creation of Athalie, performed in 1770 for the wedding of the future Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. European music was also heard in far-flung places. This was the subject of the session ‘Beyond the Boundaries of Baroque Music’, and papers extending the boundaries of the European Baroque were heard in other sessions as well. In ‘Beyond the Boundaries’, a paper by Joyce Lindorff (Temple University) dealt primarily with the Macartney Embassy of 1793 and stressed the essential role that music and ritual played in diplomatic exchanges. Before his trip, Macartney consulted Charles Burney, who devised a plan that he thought would appeal to Chinese listeners, suggesting, among other things, that wind instruments would please. Although the idea of music's power may be near universal, concepts of its sound and meaning were not, and the embassy failed on account of conflicting agendas. Thomas Irvine (University of Southampton) likewise dealt with material from around 1800, discussing the ‘soundscape’ of encounters between the Imperial Inspector of Maritime Trade in Canton and the trading ships of the British East India Company. The music and other sounds belonged to the ritual of trade, as the two groups negotiated both for goods and through such matters as identity and precedence. David R. M. Irving (University of Nottingham) revealed the unexpected publication of metrical psalters in the Eastern Indian Ocean, including his find in the Cambridge University Library of an example published in Batavia (Jakarta) in 1703. The psalters were prepared for the use of Malay Protestants and printed in Malay, Portuguese and local languages. The psalms were probably performed monophonically, to fit with the cultural norms of the Asian Christians. The conference schedule also included papers dealing with music in Spain, Portugal and the New World.

Considerable re-evaluation and expansion is currently underway in the scholarship of baroque music, as evidenced by reports on ongoing projects. Thomas Hochradner (Universität Mozarteum Salzburg) reported on the challenges of preparing a new edition of the works of Johann Joseph Fux; Rui Cabral Lopes (Universidad Complutense de Madrid/Universidade Nova de Lisboa) reported on the Portuguese content of a catalogue of baroque villancico librettos (the Catalogo descriptivo de pliegos de villancicos, or CDPV); Paologiovanni Maione (Conservatorio di Musica Domenico Cimarosa) described a database of librettos from the Neapolitan ‘commedia per musica’ (<www.operabuffa.turchini.it>); and Cécile Davy-Rigaux (IRPMF [Institut de Recherche sur la Patrimoine Musicale en France]: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique [CNRS]/Bibliothèque nationale de France) and Nathalie Berton-Blivet (IRPMF-CNRS) reported on the MUSEFREM project (Musiques d'église en France à l'époque moderne), a collaboration among musicologists and historians documenting church musicians and music in France.

There was also live music. At a Thursday evening concert, Adrian Chandler and his ensemble La Serenissima presented ‘Venice by Night’, a selection of music mostly from their recent CD of the same name. The concert included fine solo playing by Chandler and the trumpeter Simon Munday, and especially marvellous was the expressive bassoon playing of Peter Whelan, whose instrument just seemed to be part of him in Vivaldi's Concerto in C major rv477. We also heard the lutenist and guitarist Elizabeth Kenny at the opening reception. She, like Chandler, is on the faculty of the University of Southampton. There were several lecture-recitals: one featuring eighteenth-century music was that by Mark Kroll (Boston University) on François Couperin's harpsichord music and its effect in performance.

The conference concluded with the usual business meeting, at which the delegates voted to accept the Mozarteum's invitation to meet in Salzburg in 2014.

With thanks to Alison DeSimone (University of Michigan) and Samantha Owens (University of Queensland) for their input.