Approximately sixty established scholars and graduate students gathered for this three-day conference, hosted by Florida State University College of Music, whose presentations displayed the vibrancy of scholarship on eighteenth-century music and musical life. All of the events, including a lovely evening reception outdoors, took place at the historic Mission San Luis. Originally established in 1656 by Spanish friars and Apalachee Native Americans, the site is now home to a living-history museum with reconstructed buildings and a conference centre, as well as being a repository of archaeological artefacts for the state of Florida. Attendees were given private tours of the Mission and its archaeological holdings. The latter included eighteenth-century pottery, shards of glassware and coins, many of them salvaged from shipwrecks. The museum's gigantic Council House, constructed from logs and woven palm fronds, was particularly impressive and striking. For those of us who were unfamiliar with the history of this area of the United States, the setting itself was eye-opening and educational.

The event's opening session sought better to contextualize two canonical composers: J. S. Bach and Joseph Haydn. Devon J. Borowski (University of Chicago) examined Bach's Kaffeekantate in light of increasing concerns of the time about white people imbibing a beverage produced by black slaves, as well as about the drink's dubious effects on young women and feminine morality. My own paper (Laurel E. Zeiss, Baylor University), cast in the form of a letter, placed Haydn's correspondence within the context of eighteenth-century literary trends and epistolary practices.

The next three papers questioned received wisdom about musical genres. Anita Hardeman (Western Illinois University) argued that most critiques of French operatic prologues incorrectly apply a naturalistic aesthetic to these works and ignore their non-verbal elements. By applying concepts from scholarship on ritual to specific operas, Hardeman demonstrated how prologues function as liminal spaces that allow spectators to make the transition from the outside world into a realm where other customs guide a person's experience. Similarly, Jenna Harmon (Northwestern University) showed that while vaudevilles have typically been associated with public entertainments, clandestine private performances organized by wealthy Parisians incorporated them too, often to quite bawdy effect. Her findings raised questions about the relations between written texts, aural memory and authorship, as well as the supposed gap between public entertainments and aristocratic ones. Julia Coelho and Judith Mabary's paper (University of Missouri; delivered in absentia) claimed that melodramas were more influential on Mozart's dramatic works than has hitherto been thought.

Current SECM president Sarah Eyerly and three Florida State graduate students (Rachel Bani, Laura Clapper and Mark Sciuchetti) presented the results of a year-long collaborative project on ‘The Musical History of Mission San Luis de Apalachee’. Through archival research and digital mapping technologies, the group constructed an interactive sound map of the Mission as it may have existed c1703. Depending on one's location within the sixty-three-acre settlement, inhabitants could hear the sounds of a blacksmith, Native American rattles, Spanish folksongs or a rippling stream. The group's presentation revealed what can be garnered from exploring local music histories as an interdisciplinary team and imaginatively harnessing technology.

Next Kimary Fick (Oregon State University) and Alison C. DeSimone (University of Missouri – Kansas City) presented an excellent lecture-recital of eighteenth-century music for harpsichord and flute by two female composers: Elisabetta de Gambarini and Anna Bon. Fick and DeSimone delved into how these women marketed themselves as composers as well as their published compositions to a predominantly male clientele. Gambarini's impressive subscriber list and Bon's inclusion in the 1794 edition of Johann Georg Sulzer's encyclopedia Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Kunste suggest that the women successfully negotiated societal constraints in order to capitalize on a growing amateur market. The duo's lively and polished performance – Fick playing the baroque flute and DeSimone the harpsichord – further illuminated the appeal of Gambarini's and Bon's music.

All of the papers presented in Saturday morning's session were the outcome of extensive detective work involving archives and primary sources. Beverly Wilcox (Sacramento State University) discussed how French composers modified Pergolesi's Stabat mater in order to appeal to French tastes. The challenges of archival work in Mexico formed the focus for the talk by Dianne Goldman (Columbia College Chicago). She explained how the consolidation of archives that took place during the 1850s, in order to make items easier to find, had led in fact to the opposite, with music being separated from printed texts; yet through meticulous comparison of sources, score and libretto may occasionally be reunited. Through close study of feast-day accounts, for example, Goldman was able to explain the strange form of a piece by Ignacio Jerusalem and reconnect it to a printed source. Careful study of eighteenth-century biographical sources led Halvor K. Hosar (University of Auckland) to conclude that Wanhal moved to Vienna and began his career as a composer later than had previously been thought. Hosar's research convincingly explains why Wanhal is absent from the 1766 article ‘Von dem Wienerischen Geschmack in der Musik’ attributed to Carl von Dittersdorf, an omission that has long puzzled scholars; the presentation won him the prize for best graduate student paper.

The following session focused on performance practice. Cameron Davis Steuart (University of Georgia) explored the musical components of performances by Signora Corilla, the most celebrated improviser of sung poetry in Italy during the late 1700s. Guido Olivieri (University of Texas at Austin) argued persuasively that two recently discovered manuscripts show a robust tradition of cello pedagogy and performance existed in Naples earlier than previously assumed.

Questions of cultural exchange linked the next two papers. Don Fader (University of Alabama) demonstrated how significant the Prince of Vaudémont's time as governor of Milan was to the Italian experience of Parisian music. Documents reveal that Vaudémont actively introduced French elements into Milanese musical life, particularly its operas. Likewise, violinist and composer Montéclair's time as one of the Prince's musicians fostered his distinctive Franco-Italian style. The influence of Abbé Vogler's supposed collection of world musics, Polymelos, was the topic addressed by Bertil van Boer (University of Western Washington). While Vogler claimed he had studied and collected non-Western musics on his travels, contemporaneous documents indicate he probably never left Europe. Van Boer asserted that, nevertheless, Vogler's attempts to expose audiences to new, exotic sonorities influenced later composers and song collectors.

A famous portrait of Giacinta Orsini and the music it contains was the subject of a rich lecture-recital. John A. Rice (Rochester, Minnesota) discussed Orsini's tragically brief life and her artistic accomplishments, before explaining the Arcadian imagery of the painting and examining its music. Recently identified manuscripts confirm that the score depicted is a portion of a cantata Orsini created with composer Antonio Aurisicchio on the eve of her father's departure from Rome. Soprano Lily Guerrero and harpsichordist Tyler Tucker (both students at Florida State) then performed the aria that appears in the portrait; their rendition was possibly the work's first performance in modern times.

Conference attendees were treated to more music that evening. The Florida State Early Music Ensembles, directed by Valerie Arsenault and Laura Clapper, presented works by Abel, Marini, Rossi, Leclair, J. C. Bach and others. The delight the performers, especially the recorder players, took in this music was palpable and made the concert all the more enjoyable.

A series of presentations on Sunday delved into how politics and music intersected in different regions. Amy Dunagin (Kenneshaw State University) used political poems to demonstrate how British critiques of Italian opera as luxurious and effeminate were shaped by ongoing debates about the War of the Spanish Succession. Anxieties about military defeats, mounting war costs and serving under a female monarch, Queen Anne, were all mapped onto commentary about the genre – a backdrop most modern commentators ignore. Julia I. Doe (Columbia University) contextualized the pastoral operas commissioned and presented by Marie Antoinette at her pastoral retreat, the Petit Trianon. In mounting these rustic-themed operas, the queen sought to deflect criticisms of the court, yet these works mired her in further controversies, partly because the artifice of the medium and the setting contradicted what she hoped to convey. Laura Lohman (California State University Fullerton) showed how both Federalists and Republicans employed songs to debate issues and court voters during the early days of US independence. Republican printers in particular used contrafacta to defend the freedom of speech.

The conference's final paper, by James MacKay (Loyola University New Orleans), addressed analytical methods. MacKay advocated pairing Janet Schmalfeldt's ideas about ‘form as process’ with William Caplin's theory of formal functions in order to create a more flexible system for comprehending later eighteenth-century forms.

On the previous day former SECM president Sterling Murray had given a plenary lecture entitled ‘Music in Context: A Reflection on the Study of Eighteenth-Century Music’. Murray reflected on how the study of the era's music has progressed. When he was a young scholar, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and their works dominated classrooms and research agendas. During the past twenty-five years, scholars have augmented our knowledge about the musical and cultural context of these figures. More importantly, research has expanded to include musical centres outside of Vienna, and more attention has been and is still being paid to lesser-known composers, smaller courts and religious houses. Scholars have also explored more closely how people heard and experienced music, particularly those who have applied topoi and schemata to musical works. Murray argued, however, that additional research is needed in order more fully to comprehend eighteenth-century soundscapes. Scholars could and should focus less on music of the elite. He advocated further investigation into conventional musical patterns and listening practices, and the development of more micro-histories. Murray closed his remarks by urging audience members to communicate the breadth of musical life in the 1700s more effectively, particularly to undergraduate students. His lecture provoked a lively discussion about how eighteenth-century music is currently being taught and how it possibly could be.

The papers presented at the conference certainly did demonstrate that scholars of eighteenth-century music have extended their horizons beyond Vienna and Habsburg realms. Music from New Spain, the United States, England, eastern Germany and various regional centres in Italy and France was discussed. Many of the presentations and the two lecture-recitals were devoted, in essence, to recovering missing portions of Murray's soundscape. A number of others, including Borowski's provocative paper about Bach's Kaffeekantate and Dunagin's excellent analysis of the rhetoric surrounding critiques of Italian opera, addressed how politics influenced not only what but also how people heard. Transnationalism was another prominent theme, as was the questioning of conceptual boundaries. Several papers, including my own, argued that the borders between public and private, and between aural and written, were weak during the 1700s. Taken as a whole, the conference revealed that perspectives on eighteenth-century musical life are becoming more nuanced.

The warm hospitality offered by the professors and graduate students of Florida State University's College of Music as well as the Mission's staff created a congenial atmosphere that enhanced the event. SECM president Sarah Eyerly, the programme committee (Drew Edward Davies, Stewart Carter, Caryl Clark and Danielle Kuntz) and all those who helped with the local arrangements should be commended for all of their hard work behind the scenes, which resulted in a stimulating and enjoyable conference that ran seamlessly.