The Haydn Society of North America Mini-Conference, held in cooperation with the Sixth New Beethoven Research Conference, took place immediately before the joint meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory in Vancouver. This two-day event, which included several joint sessions, allowed Beethoven and Haydn scholars the opportunity to share ideas about the two composers. Throughout the Haydn portion, presenters showed a high level of sophistication and creativity in their papers, often challenging traditional ways of looking at the composer's works.

A recurring theme of the conference was the importance of undertaking further archival work. Presenters emphasized how such work goes hand in hand with interpretation of how a culture may have shaped a collection, and even how a collection may have shaped a community. For example, Erica Buurman (Canterbury Christ Church University) not only described whose music was performed for the Viennese Fine Artists’ Pension Society (Pensionsgesellschaft bildender Künstler), but also noted that most of the composers who contributed dances to their charity balls were associated with the imperial court rather than the private salons of Vienna, which is why Haydn and Beethoven were performed less frequently than their contemporaries. The revival of Haydn's dances in the 1860s thus suggests a growing concern with the historic importance of that composer for the Society. In ‘Haydn in Latrobe: Providing Context to Manuscripts Held at St. Vincent College’ James P. Cassaro (University of Pittsburgh) showed not only that manuscript copies of eighteenth-century works can still surface, but also that they can offer insight into the availability of sheet music into the mid-nineteenth century, and the culture of small communities in America at that time. Cassaro has added a number of these newly found manuscripts to RISM, and will continue to add as much of the collection as possible.

Another area explored at the conference was how to prepare a performance of Haydn's music. In ‘The English Libretto of The Creation Reexamined’ David Schildkret (Arizona State University) explained his process for creating a pragmatic English-language performance edition of Haydn's work that maintained the themes and meaning of text and music. Ulrich Wilker (Joseph Haydn-Institut, Cologne) discussed the preparation of his critical report for Haydn's last three symphonies (Nos 102–104), a companion to the 1963 Henle critical edition edited by Hubert Unverricht, illuminating the process of finding the most useful sources for such an enterprise. While critical editions are not always considered performance scores, Wilker felt that they need not be prohibitively complicated, and that they allow performers to think through their choices more consciously.

Alexandra Amati-Camperi (University of San Francisco) blended these two themes of creating a thoughtful performance and using historical documents in new ways by examining Haydn's opera L'anima del filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice. She asked why early twentieth-century stagings ‘let Orfeo off the hook’ for his role in Euridice's demise. Amati-Camperi challenged a gendered staging that places fault with the women, which she argued contradicts Haydn's intentions for the story, as evidenced by his musical settings and other contemporary versions of the libretto.

If Haydn scholarship is always seeking a better understanding of the culture in which Haydn composed his music, it must at the same time bear in mind that, in the words of Thomas Christensen, it is impossible to ‘pretend to immerse ourselves fully and empathetically in some distant culture like a native’ (‘Music Theory and Its Histories’, in Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. Christopher Hatch and David W. Bernstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 24). Yet the papers in the panel ‘Haydn's Aesthetics’ all convincingly addressed important contemporary ideas and texts that can inform a present understanding of Haydn's music. The paper by Katherine Walker (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) demonstrated how the writings of Alexander Gerard relate to the aesthetic of process found in Haydn's music. Gerard held that taste was both the impetus for invention and its regulating force, which together form the process of genius. In her presentation Walker suggested that Gerard's focus on process is more in line with both Haydn's compositional practice and the unfolding processes found within his music, as opposed to views of genius that valued a single and immediately recognizable idea. Drawing upon Immanuel Kant's ideas of the sublime, Tekla Babyak (Davis, California) suggested that musical representations of Kant's imperfect universe can be found in Haydn's ‘Nun schwanden vor dem heiligen Strahle’ from The Creation. My own paper for this conference (Eloise Boisjoli, University of Texas at Austin) engaged more broadly with the aesthetic of sensibility. I suggested that, rather than relying solely on a lexicon of musical topics, Haydn used a consistent series of musical features in the slow movements of his string quartets to create an affect that reflected a gentle and refined – or moderate – sensibility, correlating with the characterizations of moderate sentimental heroines in eighteenth-century literature. Such musical features work below the level of a topic, as proposed by Stephen Rumph (see ‘Topical Figurae: The Double Articulation of Topics’, in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 493–513). Given the variety of texts and ideas covered in these papers, this panel also offered a caution against the single-minded application of a single historical text or philosophy as a means of trying to understand Haydn's aesthetics.

No conference on Haydn would be complete, it seems, without a discussion of Formenlehre as it relates to the composer's idiosyncratic style. For example, Steven Mathews (University of Cincinnati) examined early double returns in some of Haydn's early symphonies. And, as is typical of Haydn scholarship (perhaps starting with Jens Peter Larsen in 1963, but possibly going as far back as Heinrich Christoph Koch in 1787), presenters challenged models of musical form in light of their suitability for analysing Haydn's works (Larsen, ‘Sonatenform-Probleme’, in Festschrift Friedrich Blume, ed. Anna Amalie Abert and Wilhelm Pfannkuch (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963), 221–230; Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, three volumes, volume 2 (Leipzig: Adam Friedrich Böhme, 1787)). Jason Yust (Boston University) challenged James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's idea of parageneric space – a segment of music that ‘stands outside the sonata form’ – as outlined in their Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), page 282. Yoel Greenberg (Bar Ilan University) examined the altered reprise in early and late movements, and argued that an altered reprise does not necessarily carry the same rotational-form implications that later movements in sonata form do.

The topic of influence between Beethoven and Haydn was, unsurprisingly, also addressed at this joint conference. Refreshingly, the two papers that dealt directly with influence relied on specific musical similarities, rather than solely on the historical and biographical connections between the two composers. This led to two intriguing ways of engaging with compositional similarities. James Palmer (University of British Columbia and Douglas College) compared the finale of Haydn's String Quartet Op. 33 No. 2 with Beethoven's Bagatelle Op. 33 No. 2, looking at the different ways in which the two composers use the technique of ‘humorous excess’ to create musical jokes. He argued that Beethoven's Op. 33 No. 2 possesses an ‘intramusical tension’ foreshadowing the concluding joke, while Haydn's unprepared joke is the more surprising. James MacKay (Loyola University) compared the key-relation strategies of Haydn's Op. 17 and Op. 20 quartets to those found in Beethoven's Op. 18 quartets, suggesting an influence of the earlier composer on the later through similarities in harmonic technique.

The finale to the mini-conference was a presentation by Caryl Clark (University of Toronto) and Sarah Day-O'Connell (Skidmore College) on the progress of their project ‘The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia’. They are co-editing a new kind of encyclopedia on the composer, a book meant both to ‘digest’ the state of the field and to ‘spur new ways of research’. The key features will be copious in-text cross-referencing and a detailed index, in order to entice readers to continue reading entries and gain a wider contextual understanding of a topic. The publication date has not been settled at this time.

One common thread throughout all the papers was the challenging of traditional approaches to the composer's music. Clarke and Day-O'Connell's new approach to an encyclopedia is one example of this. The careful ‘introversive’ approach to influence in Palmer's and MacKay's papers challenges research focused on documentary evidence, just as Buurman and Cassaro question the notion that archival work on Haydn's music is essentially complete. The additions to Formenlehre models seen in Greenberg's and Yust's presentations reflect not only a robust history of developing models that work specifically for Haydn's music, but also the need for continued exploration of Haydn's ‘sonata-form’ movements.

Haydn's music continues to intrigue and animate scholars and listeners more than two hundred years after the composer's death, with new sources still appearing, new archival work being undertaken, new insights into music and culture being offered, and our ability to process and frame information in new and exciting ways. One happy observation was the number of performers in the audience, and the questions that arose regarding the arguments and conclusions the papers presented. This bodes well for good performances of Haydn's works, and in turn, continued interest in research on the composer.