French baroque music tends to be a poor stepchild in the study of Western music, in university music departments and in contemporary concert life. In contrast to the Italian style that dominated most of Europe and the German repertory of Bach, Handel and their musical children, godchildren and grandchildren (literal or metaphorical) – often cited as having established a universal musical language of the soul – French music has largely been viewed in social terms, tied to the projection of grandeur by Louis XIV and to la belle danse. A look at practically any undergraduate textbook will confirm this. Indeed, until relatively recently, music-history textbooks gave only a passing mention to French baroque sacred music, despite its being a major area of repertory and research. Likewise, French music from this time tends to suffer in modern reception because its soulful performance relies on a host of subtle, non-notated conventions that in turn depend on bon goût, as they put it back then. Further, an incomplete understanding of this repertory and its culture still haunts, for example, the literature on the galant style, whose complex French roots have yet to be plumbed to anywhere near their real depths.

These and many more issues were among the motivations behind this international conference, and they occupied a central place in many of the discussions during the event, which extended over four days at four different splendid locations. Contributions came not only from members of the institutions where sessions were held, but also from several major research entities. These included, in addition to those named above, the Institut de Recherche en Musicologie (IReMus), various branches of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the French ministry of culture. The aim of the conference was not only to promote research and performance of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French music, but also to encourage conversation and exchange between researchers from across the world, performing musicians and those working in arts management. Thus there were several different elements united under the concept of the ‘rethinking’ of this repertory. The scholarly element was inspired by the three hundred and fiftieth birthday of François Couperin (1668–1733), which explains a certain emphasis on harpsichord music (including three concerts dominated by it) and on Couperin's notion of the ‘goûts-réunis’ (a mixing of the French and Italian styles), a topic that occupied more than one session. The main thrust, however, was the notion of ‘rethinking’. Many in the field today recognize that, after the renaissance of French baroque music scholarship following the publication of James R. Anthony's seminal French Baroque Music (New York: Norton, 1974; revised edition, Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1997), there is a need to consider and synthesize the many strands of recent research.

With a conference so rich in different ideas and approaches, it would be impossible to give a summary of each presentation that was given in the fifteen sessions. Anyone seeking detailed information on particular events can consult the conference website (rethinking.sciencesconf.org), which includes the fifty-eight-page programme together with abstracts. The organizers sought papers from a wide range of areas, all of which were represented to varying degrees: historiography, cultural approaches, performance practice, pedagogy, analysis, digital humanities and other data-based approaches, and work on outreach and dissemination.

The conference began with an evening gathering at the Sorbonne and a concert by students in the university's new master's programme combining studies in musicology and performance. Following this, each of the four full days had a particular focus or set of foci. The first day, hosted by the Bibliothèque nationale (Richelieu), broke up into two sets of parallel sessions focusing on musicological approaches to issues concerning opera singers, the notion of different publics, dance and – yes – sacred music. Day two brought the participants to the Centre de Musique Baroque at Versailles in one united session, with presentations focusing on performance practice and pedagogy, two of the Centre's main preoccupations. Days three and four involved a journey to the spectacular abbey at Royaumont, a centre for arts and culture. The morning of day three again featured musicological topics in split sessions, including ‘Nations and the goûts-réunis’; ‘Theory, Pedagogy and Composition à la française’; French baroque music in film; and librettos. The afternoon saw a single session in which various aspects of the sometimes troubled relationship between musicological research/editing and performance was debated. The final day was divided into a session devoted to comic opera and another focusing on various questions concerning historiography, performance and the notion of genre. The day culminated in a roundtable, with short presentations by a panel of scholars who sought to bring together the various thematic strands of the conference for plenary discussion.

Musicological sessions encompassed source studies, studies of the repertory in its historical contexts (including performance practice) and the role of music in contemporary life (including, for example, the place of French baroque repertory in film). The paper sessions and other moments for communal discussion served as points to assess the state of the field, the resonance of the repertory, the changes brought by the opening of new areas in musicology, and methodological and epistemological problems faced by those working on French baroque music. The latter include the term ‘French baroque’ itself. In a conference where the notion of one or more réunions des goûts took pride of place, questions about musical nationality and patrimony (or matrimony, as Raphaëlle Legrand (Université Paris-Sorbonne) pointed out in her talk on the notion of the fille d'opéra, the bad-girl performer) were front and centre. To what extent can there be said to have been a French style (or styles)? How should one account for the influential role in France of music by non-French composers, a category in which Lully could certainly be included? Might ‘music in France’ (note the conference title) be a more appropriate concept than ‘French music’? What about connections with other nations (transferts culturels, often translated as ‘cultural transfer’), or influences from outside Western Europe?

Many talks dealt specifically with travel to or from France, including those by Louise K. Stein (University of Michigan) on the positive reception of the castrato Siface's mellifluous voice, by Stewart Cheney (Texas Christian University) on the travels of André Maugars, by Guido Olivieri (University of Texas at Austin) on the influence of Italian violinists who visited France in the early eighteenth century, and by Erica Levenson (Syracuse University) on the influence of French popular song on English ballad opera. Other papers considered broad issues of cultural exchange and influence. Rose A. Pruiksma (University of New Hampshire) explored the representation of Spanish culture in ballets de cour, while John S. Powell (University of Tulsa) focused on Lully's Italian music. There was an entire session on the notion of the ‘public’: Lois Rosow (Ohio State University) demonstrated that Lully adopted the idea of printing luxurious full-folio scores from the earlier efforts of Robert Ballard and Robert Cambert in order to spread the fame of his music; Laurent Guillo (CNRS) discussed the importance of catalogues of private library sales as indicators of musical trends; and I (Don Fader, University of Alabama) offered Michel Pignolet de Montéclair as an early example of a freelance composer who used the newly influential medium of print to construct his identity as a cosmopolitan composer. Several papers addressed the influence of particular communities. These included Sarawathi Shukla (University of California Berkeley) on the urban network of musicians and instrument builders in the Saint-Merri quartier of Paris; John Romey (Case Western University) on the influence on popular song of literary-musical games in salon contexts; and Judith le Blanc (Université de Rouen) on the literary sources for the titles of François Couperin's harpsichord pieces. One session was devoted to sacred music, beginning with two papers on rhetoric – by Alexis VanZalen (Eastman School of Music) on the organ music of Nivers and by Lars Henrik Johansen (Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet) on Charpentier's Leçons de ténèbres – followed by an overview of music in French convents and monasteries by the team of Fabien Guilloux (CNRS), Déline Drèze (Université catholique de Louvain) and Nathalie Berton-Bivet (CNRS).

Several ‘rethinking’ papers, including three that I managed to hear, were self-consciously revisionist. The first was a wonderful lecture-demonstration by Rebecca Harris-Warrick (Cornell University) and Hubert Hazebroucq (Les Corps Éloquents, Paris), who forcefully established that common assumptions about relationships between dance music and choreography are belied by a complex reality in which steps work in opposition to, or across, metrical patterns in the music, especially in theatrical dance. The second paper, by Matthieu Franchin (Université Paris-Sorbonne) on the discovery of new documents in the archives of the Comédie française, revealed that musical activity at the Comédie was not as diminished under Lully's privilège as previously thought. This was followed by a talk given jointly by Louis Delpech (Universität Heidelberg) and Thierry Favier (Université de Poitiers), who pointed out that the notion of genre as defined by common stylistic characteristics is considerably more slippery that we realize, and that when works of a certain genre moved between contexts – especially national contexts – they were categorized in quite different ways.

Another major theme taken up in both lectures and discussions was the need for more collaboration between performance and musicology, despite the increasing number of performer-musicologists and musicologist-performers. One of the main points of tension had to do with the dominance of large, famous and well-funded ensembles, whose practical exigencies (not to mention the artistic egos of their star directors) often promote a neglect of historical sources, practices and aesthetics. Several musicological speakers – especially Lionel Sawkins (Beckenham, UK) and Julien Dubruque (Université Paris-Sorbonne) – skewered the practices of modern players, and I must say that several performers who gave presentations did not do much to demonstrate a particularly sophisticated understanding of the repertory. A high point was a stunning chamber concert of instrumental music and songs by Charpentier given by members of Ensemble Correspondances, who demonstrated a firm grasp of the music's expressive power and an ability to bring it across to a modern audience.

Many of the issues outlined above were also invoked in plenary addresses by senior figures in the field such as Sawkins, Catherine Massip, Catherine Cessac and John Hajdu Heyer, as well as in a final panel discussion. These sessions provoked considerable debate about the role of French repertory today and ways in which it might be expanded. Pedagogy was one important part of the discussion: there is a need for more musicologists who can teach the repertory well, especially those at PhD-granting institutions who might inspire students to join the field, as Hajdu Heyer pointed out. The relationship of musicology to performance was also addressed by Catherine Cessac in her talk. She noted that while it is encouraging that many musicologists and early musicians today have experience in both areas – a product of curricular developments in the educational programmes that train them – this is an aspect that can nevertheless be developed further in the future. Finally, the importance of fruitful exchanges between colleagues who are widely separated methodologically, generationally, geographically and linguistically demonstrates the need for more events like this one.