In every aspect of cultural theory, considering both the apparently universal aspects of our common humanity and the manifold differences between cultures and individuals is such a huge and fraught undertaking that no one conference can hope to do more than chip away at the edges of the questions raised. This is true even if the purview is limited to the historical study of eighteenth-century musical approaches to these questions. Nevertheless, chipping away at those edges is productive and stimulating, and in this spirit we converged at Oxford – part of the time at the music faculty at St Aldate’s, and part of the time at Wadham College – to discuss ‘Alterity and Universalism in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought’. The conference was organized by David R. M. Irving (Australian National University) and Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University) under the auspices of Reinhard Strohm's Balzan prize. Strohm is only the second musicologist (the other was Ludwig Finscher) to have received the Balzan award. He will pursue his ambitious project called ‘Towards a Global History of Music’ over the coming three years.

After opening remarks by Strohm, the first official paper, ‘Musical Thought in the Global Enlightenments’, was presented by Philip Bohlman (University of Chicago). It made an excellent opening by problematizing several of the terms that would be in play for the entire conference – starting with ‘Enlightenment’. Rather than allowing a complacent assumption of a monolithic Western-European Enlightenment, Bohlman proposed that there were many Enlightenments, and many types of Enlightenment, around Europe and the world, all of which shaped music-making in the eighteenth century. He offered case studies of Jewish, Irish, Ottoman and South Asian Enlightenments. He speculated about musical parallels (such as the development of ternary forms) that might seem coincidental but could potentially also be read as accompanying parallel shifts in cultural ideas in different places at the same time. Already certain themes that would recur at the conference began to emerge clearly. Some were felicitous, such as the issues raised by Psalm 133 about the meaning of singing one's songs in a strange land through cultural encounters. Others were more theoretically predictable given the conference title. For example, Bohlman set a precedent, followed up at various points over the next three days, of considering how Enlightenment ideas – about self and other, group identity and the sense of responsibility that comes with a cosmopolitan perspective – related to today's current events. Another major theme was immediately followed up in the next paper by Keith Chapin (Cardiff University), with ‘Centres, Peripheries, and the Dynamics of Cultural Transfer in the Long Eighteenth Century: The Case of Northern Germany’. Chapin noted the importance of perception in applying the terms centre and periphery, focusing particularly on North German musical practice in the eighteenth century, when different aspects seemed to emanate from different international ‘centres’ (styles from Italy, aesthetics from France, public writing from Britain and so forth) but could be re-‘centred’ around German values.

Emily Dolan (University of Pennsylvania) was at the last minute unable to attend the conference owing to doctor's orders, but bravely presented her paper, ‘Instruments, History, and Sentimental Empiricism’, via Skype. After some initial technical problems, the sound was working and Dolan shared her insights about the role that instruments played in crystallizing and reinforcing Burney's philosophy of history. By considering instruments as naturally developing phenomena, Burney helped music itself become a living, developing story, part of the universalist aspirations of his collecting and narrating project.

The next day we reconvened at Wadham College. The papers on the morning panel addressed ideas of alterity and universalism by focusing on encounters, in particular between Europeans and those outside of Europe. The question of perceived centre and periphery again reared its head. The first two of the papers dealt with Europeans and their music from the point of view of non-Europeans, here considered not primarily as victims of European colonialist aggression but, at least in these micro-contexts, as those in power in local environments. Glenda Goodman (University of Southern California) has thought in depth about how to analyse Native American perceptions of European music in the absence of much indigenous written testimony. In ‘Othering Europe: Indigenous Responses to Musical Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic World’ she drew on deductive historiographical techniques theorized and expanded by her fellow scholars of Native American history, such as ‘upstreaming’ (working backwards from present cultural studies to reconstruct past cultural systems) and ‘side-streaming’ (reconstructing aspects of one past culture from knowledge of another related culture about which we have more information). The part of her project she presented here worked with the testimony of Europeans who were captured by various Iroquois and Algonquian groups in the eighteenth century and who later wrote about their experiences. These captives were often forced by their captors to sing their own songs in a strange land, as it were (once again there were resonances with Psalm 133), as parts of rituals of assimilation, humiliation or even torture. Goodman's analysis of the subtly different ways that European music could be used to subvert European influence and power in local contexts even as that influence and power grew on a global level was fascinating. Next Katherine Butler Schofield (King's College London) took up the issue of how non-Europeans forged meanings from their encounters with Europeans and relocated it to half-way around the world, in Northern India. She began with an art analogy, looking at a series of late seventeenth-century erotic paintings by the Mughal painter Hamid Ruknuddin and his workshop in Bikaner. The painter was able to fill out his complete series of potential sexual positions without disgracing any of his patrons by inserting, in the least respected position for the male (under the woman), a Portuguese commander rather than a Mughal prince. But this choice was more than a simple belittling of the foreigner, since at the same time, in order to depict the commander, the artist adopted European stylistic traits (such as a three-quarter profile) that were absent elsewhere in the series. In the truly multicultural crossroads of the Mughal empire, artistic translating and filtering of cultures in different directions could carry over to music, and into the next century, with the many changes it brought. This was shown, for example, in Indian reactions to and involvement in Western music and Western transcriptions of Indian music. The panel's last paper, ‘Travel, Anthropology, and the Paradox of Enlightened Cosmopolitanism’, by Joan-Pau Rubiés (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Universitat Pompeu Fabra), was the most abstract. It returned to the European point of view, but turned it somewhat upon itself. Rubiés considered the contradictions between Enlightened European scepticism and the cosmopolitanism that emerged in reaction to it, which relied on encounters with other cultures for its critiques of European values but at the same time filtered its ideas of those cultures through European values and prejudices.

After a generous lunch and afternoon break, we returned for a roundtable discussion. The participants offered opening statements on Rousseau's tendency to frame universal elements as inborn propensities rather than specific features (Ruth HaCohen, Hebrew University of Jerusalem); on Friedrich David Gräter as a pioneering early ethnographer who self-consciously considered what it would mean to transcribe and remove the songs he collected from their original social contexts (Adeline Mueller, University of Oxford); on cross-cultural musical transcription and some parallels to the separating of phonetics and phonology in language (myself (Matthew Gelbart, Fordham University)); and on depictions of non-Western music in eighteenth-century Spain, in newspapers and especially in the writing of the exiled Spanish Jesuit Antonio Eximeno (Miguel Ángel Marín, Universidad de La Rioja). After some back and forth between the participants, the discussion opened to the audience, and widened to consider further matters such as the relationship between theoretical work on cross-cultural encounters and the experiences (and often suffering) of those involved in them.

When the roundtable was over, we proceeded immediately to an excellent harpsichord recital of François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau performed by Mahan Esfahani in the Holywell Music Room. To tie into the theme of the conference, Esfahani had chosen pieces that demonstrated forms of eighteenth-century exoticism, and as an encore played a rousing rendition of Rameau's Gavotte et six doubles. From there it was off to the conference dinner, where, because of the more intimate size of the conference, we got to mix with many of our fellow attendees and even switch seats a bit for dessert.

The final morning of the conference featured papers by the two conveners, David R. M. Irving and Estelle Joubert. Connecting from a more musical angle with some aspects of Rubiés's earlier paper, Irving's ‘Analogues of Antiquity: World Cultures, Ancient Greek Music, and Comparative Anthropologies, 1500–1800’ was about the tension between the apparent openness to different cultures or types of music that came with eighteenth-century cosmopolitan and universalist projects, and the exceptionalism that at the same time increasingly crystallized when Europeans wrote about their own cultivated music. Greece, for example, was a physically dangerous place to visit for much of the eighteenth century, and this raised questions for sceptics who wondered about the vaunted claims for ancient Greek civilization and its relationship to modern Greece, and to modern Europe in general. China was a singular case, and presented problems in that it was seen as ‘civilized’ yet needed to be reconciled with European exceptionalism. Joubert's ‘“Analytical Encounters”: Global Music Criticism and Enlightenment Ethnomusicology’ followed up further on the uniqueness of the Chinese example, but turned its focus in terms of source material more sharply onto the short articles in German periodicals that reviewed and distilled longer works on non-European music by writers such as Joseph-François Lafitau or Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot. She argued that although these longer works are better known to scholars today, at the time they actually had a much smaller readership (and perhaps less influence) than the many short articles that were spun off them in widely circulated periodicals. Vanessa Agnew was scheduled to present on this last morning as well, but was not able to attend; her presentation and viewpoint on the conference's themes were much missed.

The papers were of consistently high quality. Given the ambitious aims and wide variety of scholarly methodologies, it was particularly nice that speakers had an hour each for their official presentations and then questions and answers. The relaxed time format meant that many ideas were explored more fully than they might have been at a larger conference with less chance for development and interaction between ideas. While the questions are as open as ever, the conference provided an excellent opportunity for historians to share tools and approaches.