Annual meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) typically feature strong representation by the disciplines of English language and literature, French and Germanic literatures, history and art history. Certain fields of study within and across these disciplines also figure prominently, especially Enlightenment studies, early romanticism, religious studies and British studies. Musicology, while certainly a much smaller presence at ASECS relative to these disciplines and fields, is playing an increasingly visible and vital role in the Society. The support of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, the Mozart Society of America, the Haydn Society of North America, the North American British Music Studies Association and other ASECS affiliates have been instrumental in this growing presence. A striking aspect of the 2015 meeting was that a clear majority of musicology papers belonged to panels not sponsored by one of these musical societies.

On Thursday Glenda Goodman (University of Pennsylvania) drew on extensive evidence from musical commonplace books and manuscripts to argue that these sources were vital to men's and women's self-fashioning as amateur musicians in eighteenth-century New England. Alyson McLamore (California Polytechnic Institute) considered the role of women concert organizers in London's musical life, specifically Ann Ford at the Little Theatre in London's Haymarket and Theresa Cornelys in forming the partnership of J. C. Bach and C. F. Abel. Also centred on musical life in London was a paper by Michael Burden (University of Oxford) entitled ‘“A Side Box at the Opera”: The Gendering of the Box at London's King's Theatre’. In a lively panel on questions of authenticity and ‘Ossian's Legacy’, Paul Moulton (College of Idaho) argued that conceptions of genius in early romantic musical thought owe a significant debt to Ossian.

Thursday also featured the first of a series of stimulating panels on rethinking romanticism in the long eighteenth century. The origins of romanticism in musicological historiography typically postdate those found in scholarship on British history and literature, sometimes by a significant margin (with origins increasingly being pushed backward, as the session chair, Jeff Strabone of Connecticut College, controversially suggested of the work of Scottish poet and songwriter Allan Ramsay). Edmund Goehring (University of Western Ontario) illuminated several central aspects of the musical side of early romantic historiography, drawing on Mozart reception by Hoffmann and Reichardt, and the contested status of such accounts in recent scholarship. It was refreshing to have a musicological voice on a topic that would have been dominated in past meetings by non-musical scholars.

On Friday the Mozart Society of America sponsored a rich panel of four papers chaired by Laurel Zeiss (Baylor University). Bertil Van Boer (Western Washington University) contrasted two case studies of Mozart reception in Stockholm and New York in the 1790s. Sarah Eyerly (Florida State University) crossed conventional boundaries between sacred and secular by examining the intertextual circulation of Mozart's music and contrafacta in Moravian communities in Pennsylvania and New York. Martin Nedbal (University of Arkansas) challenged boundaries between court and urban musical production and reception in his paper ‘Between the Court and the Suburbs: Die Zauberflöte's Aesthetic Background and Early Viennese Reception in View of the Opera's 1801 Hoftheater Production’. Goehring concluded the session by considering the Kantian aesthetic of virtue as applied to early Mozart reception. While some resisted Mozart on the grounds that listeners to his music are merely engaged in an empty play of the senses, others argued that pleasure and virtue could coexist, viewing Die Zauberflöte as archetypal in this respect. Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University) presented two papers. The first, given during a teaching-related panel, centred on a new music-course proposal, ‘Music in the Global Eighteenth Century’, arising from the Balzan Research Project at Oxford University directed by Reinhard Strohm. The second, ‘Toward a Post-Habermasian Public Sphere in Musicology’, posed serious questions about the role of the public sphere in eighteenth-century musical thought and invited a musicological rethinking of the place of emotion and sentiment within a reconceptualized paradigm.

Also on Friday the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society sponsored a panel I (Andrew Greenwood, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) convened on ‘Performance and Scottish Musical Culture’. William Donaldson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), a world authority on the highly contested topic of piobaireachd (the ‘classical’ repertory of the Highland bagpipe), argued that the formation of the Highland Societies of London and Scotland in the late eighteenth century encouraged a system of public performance, evaluation and notated scores that completely failed to do justice to the oral practices of this repertory. Elizabeth Ford (University of Glasgow) noted that the transverse flute was one of the most popular and fashionable instruments for upper-class, male and amateur musicians in Scotland, and traced its first use to 1703, over two decades earlier than previously claimed. Brianna Robertson-Kirkland (University of Glasgow) considered the important role that singers from the London stage played in vocal concerts in Lowland Scotland, and how publishers responded to the demand for printed editions of Scots and English songs and opera arias ‘as sung by’ these singers. Sarah Gerk (Oberlin College) demonstrated the important impact of Scots-Irish music on the development of early blackface minstrelsy in the United States. In the afternoon, pianist Peter Kairoff (Wake Forest University) gave an entertaining demonstration for non-specialists of various types of sonata form in the long eighteenth century, comparing examples by Galuppi, Mozart and Beethoven.

On Saturday the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music sponsored a panel convened by Paul Moulton (College of Idaho) on the social impact of eighteenth-century miscellanies. This interdisciplinary panel of short papers included musicological contributions by Alison DeSimone (University of Missouri, Kansas City) on ‘The Variety Benefit from the Spoken Theater to the Concert Hall in Early Eighteenth-Century England’ and by Christa Pehl Evans (Princeton University) on ‘Casper Schaffner and Musical Commonplacing’. An extensive question-and-answer session produced many fruitful exchanges between musicologists and literary scholars. Julia Doe (Columbia University) concluded a stimulating panel on ‘The Hapsburgs, 1740–1792’ by arguing that the Austrian-born queen Marie Antoinette played a central role in reorienting courtly fashions away from tragédie lyrique and toward opéra comique and Enlightenment naturalism in the last twenty years of the old regime. In a late afternoon panel on ballads and orality convened by English-literature scholar and folk music singer Ruth Perry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), I examined changing representations of orality in musical settings of Scots songs for Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd, while Marc Lerner (University of Mississippi) investigated the role of orality in popular uses of the Tellenlied in Switzerland. Bart Verheijen (Radboud Universiteit) drew on archival research conducted in France, Germany and the Netherlands to argue that popular and folk songs were a primary instrument of resistance against Napoleon between 1799 and 1815.

To conclude on a reflective note, I was struck by a comment made to me by Perry. As a strong proponent of including music papers at ASECS, she mentioned how far music still has to go to gain the full respect of larger disciplines such as English and history, as indicated by the relatively sparse attendance by such scholars at some music panels and papers. But my own limited experience at ASECS meetings gives me a more optimistic outlook. Meeting non-music scholars through ASECS and its affiliate societies has resulted in some of the most productive relationships for my own research in the Scottish Enlightenment. The society's annual conference is a great opportunity for music scholars to engage in meaningful interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration with scholars from our peer disciplines. Such engagement and the growing representation of music scholars at ASECS are vital to the development and wider recognition of eighteenth-century music as a field of study.