This conference-festival at Cornell University was a highlight among the many events held worldwide in connection with C. P. E. Bach's tercentenary. In addition to an international line-up of visiting scholars who descended upon Ithaca (only then, it might be added, to ascend the formidable hill atop which Cornell is perched), the occasion drew together from within the university the Department of Music, the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and the Atkinson Forum in American Studies. The conference was conceived around Christopher Hogwood's appointment at Cornell as A. D. White Professor-at-Large. Hogwood had been expected to attend and preside over the conference as honorary chair, but in the wake of his death on 24 September 2014 the proceedings were instead dedicated to him. Performances of C. P. E. Bach's music were interwoven with paper sessions and other events throughout each day: in all, two keynote lectures, four paper sessions, four solo keyboard recitals, two vocal-instrumental concerts, a standing exhibition, a clavichord masterclass and even a glass harmonica demonstration filled out the whirlwind, three-day schedule.

The festival opened with an organ recital, ‘Bach & Sons at the Organ’, given by David Yearsley (Cornell University) on Cornell's reproduction, completed in 2013 by Munetaka Yokota (Göteborg Organ Art Centre, Göteborgs Universitet), of a 1706 instrument by Arp Schnitger. C. P. E. Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, Wq119/6, and the chorale prelude on ‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ’, bwv Anh. II 73 (an elaboration of J. S. Bach's version from the Orgelbüchlein), were heard alongside works of his father and brothers, illuminating a lesser-known aspect of Emanuel's output. ‘It is ironic’, Yearsley noted, ‘that this Bach son who never worked as an organist, and eventually gave up playing the instrument entirely, left behind more organ music than any of his brothers’. Yearsley's learned, virtuosic playing (encompassing an improvised fugue on a theme by J. C. F. Bach and a prestissimo pedal cadenza in Wq119/6) was no less thrilling for being typical of his performances.

Yearsley also moderated the first paper session, which offered complementary approaches to ‘sensation’. That of Matthew Head (King's College London) was pathological: he offered a reading of the Fantasia ‘in tormentis’, Wq58/7, which linked its musical meaning to the subjective experience of gout. The approach of Yonatan Bar-Yoshafat (Cornell University) was aesthetical: he offered a novel reading of the Sanguineus und Melancholicus trio, Wq161/1, suggesting that these temperaments do not represent two characters in tension so much as they do the subtle flux of humours within the temperament of a single subject. As such, the work is an important borderline case between musical ‘representation’ and ‘expression’. The keynote address by James Kennaway (Newcastle University) followed both of these strands, providing a breathtaking genealogy of nervous sensation in the eighteenth century that drew on both the history of medical science and the history of ideas. Kennaway suggested that Enlightenment science provided an alternative to the traditional appeal to cosmic harmony to explain music's effect; in this way, Empfindsamkeit represents both continuity and a transition between early modern metaphysics and romantic aesthetics. A postprandial clavichord recital by Tom Beghin (McGill University) in the intimate atmosphere of Ithaca's Carriage House Café provided one with a fantasy of spending an evening in C. P. E. Bach's own music room, such as Burney described. Beghin's programme, entirely made up of works by the composer, included the Abschied von meinem Silbermannischen Claviere, Wq66; in the clavichord's silvery sound, conjured by his sensitive playing, one felt the day's heady meditations coalesce sympathetically.

The second day's paper session offered various approaches to the interpretation of Bach's late keyboard music. Annette Richards (Cornell University) considered what Empfindsamkeit might mean in the philosophical, literary and cultural contexts in which Bach lived and worked. She characterized the sensibility of the rondos and fantasias in the last Kenner und Liebhaber collection as multifarious, ‘complicat[ing] humour with satire and pathos with parody’. Nicholas Mathew (University of California, Berkeley) contemplated the material preconditions for eighteenth-century accounts of Bach's improvisations (such as that of Burney referred to above), among which he identified the increasing distance, occasioned by expanding print commerce, between the artist and the work. David Schulenberg (Wagner College and The Juilliard School) gave a paper surveying Bach's contributions in vocal genres that both counterbalanced the composer's posthumous reception as primarily a composer of keyboard music and offered new approaches for the interpretation of those keyboard works. Following an argument that Bach's reliance on the conventions of vocal genres in his instrumental works might betoken a scepticism towards instrumental genres’ intrinsic expressive capacity, Schulenberg proposed an ironic reading of the late work C. P. E. Bachs Empfindungen, Wq67. C. P. E. Bach scholarship has traditionally upheld this piece as an example of proto-romantic, ‘absolute’ expression, so it was no surprise that a new interpretation engendered lively discussion. Notably, Bar-Yoshafat argued that a reliance on vocal conventions in instrumental music might just as well signal expressive ambitions for instrumental genres; yet Schulenberg's observation that this work's aesthetic is basically conservative and representational is plausible, though it need not subvert an aesthetic of absolute instrumental expression that we might see as ‘forward-looking’.

Andrew Willis (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) played a lunchtime fortepiano recital of music by C. P. E. Bach and his contemporaries on an instrument copied from a 1784 original by Johann Andreas Stein. The music of Ernst Wilhelm Wolf (1735–1792), in particular, was a fresh delight. Willis's performance was captivating: before playing he would gaze searchingly into space as though to muster a musical idea, and when he began to play, his beautiful touch at the keyboard seemed to unleash the idea as sound. To give but one example, Willis balanced extremes of wit and plangency in the last C major Fantasia, Wq61/6; here, one heard something of Schulenberg's ‘instrumental voice’. The following keynote address by Richard Kramer (Graduate Center of the City University of New York), ‘The Klopstock Moment’, examined aesthetic theories of the ode in music and letters, and showed that in both arts the genre became, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the locus of immediate, transcendental expression. Kramer brought his readings of aestheticians to bear on settings of poetry by Bach and Gluck to produce his own sympathetic, edifying interpretations – the kind of humane criticism characteristic of his work generally.

The evening's concert by Ars Lyrica Houston (Matthew Dirst, director) bridged the first two days’ focus on European studies with the American angle of the third. The programme included Bach's organ concerto Wq34, with Richards performing the solo; J. C. F. Bach's splendid but rarely heard ‘lyric portrait’ Die Amerikanerin; the F major symphony for twelve obbligato instruments, Wq183/3; and, most unusually, Hasse and Metastasio's L’Armonica cantata for soprano and glass harmonica. Glass-harmonica player Dennis James (Rutgers University) was amply entertaining, delighting both the audience and himself with tremulous fingers on glass and flicks of water.

The Atkinson Forum in American Studies sponsored the third day of the conference, the presentations of which animated the often overlooked connections between European and American music culture in the Enlightenment, as well as more recent aspects of music culture resonating with eighteenth-century notions of sensibility. Pierpaolo Polzonetti (University of Notre Dame) surveyed the European reception (or fantasies and myths) of America, especially at the Berlin court during C. P. E. Bach's tenure there. Emily Dolan (Harvard University) offered an introduction to Benjamin Franklin's 1761 glass harmonica and its mixed reception, followed by a practical demonstration from James of the instrument's playing technique and its ‘effects on the nerves’, much commented upon in the period. Peter Sykes (Boston University and The Juilliard School) described Arnold Dolmetsch's efforts with Boston's Chickering firm to revive the clavichord during the early twentieth century, along with the attendant resurgence of the cult of sensibility in New England. Sykes then presided over a clavichord masterclass in which Cornell graduate students Jonathan Schakel and Matthew Hall performed rondos of C. P. E. Bach on a 1908 Dolmetsch-Chickering clavichord from Sykes's own collection.

After lunch, the twentieth-century thread continued with a roundtable on ‘The Technologies of the Keyboard’ that addressed the long historical tradition in which the keyboard inventions of Andrew McPherson (Queen Mary, University of London) participate. Roger Moseley (Cornell University) suggested that the clavichord and latter-day re-engineerings of keyboard interfaces such as McPherson's ‘magnetic resonator piano’ (MRP) exemplify a common urge to ‘mediate immediacy’, or to render audible the expressivity that to keyboardists seems latent in the touch of their instruments. Dolan considered the historicity of such inventions, connecting impulses like another of McPherson's inventions, ‘TouchKeys’ (sensors that transform any keyboard into a multi-touch playing surface), to the Bebung of the clavichord. The session ended with a performance of McPherson's Secrets of Antikythera (2009) for MRP by Cornell graduate student Ryan MacEvoy McCullough.

An afternoon joint concert of the Cornell Baroque Orchestra and Cornell Chamber Orchestra and Choir featured two of C. P. E. Bach's quartets for piano, flute and viola, the Symphony in B minor, Wq182/5, and the Sonata in G minor for viola da gamba and keyboard, Wq88, a work equal to J. S. Bach's contributions to the genre and rendered by gamba player Zoe Weiss (Cornell University) with virtuosity and elegance. The performance of Klopstocks Morgengesang am Schöpfungsfeste, Wq239, was a highlight of the festival.

The conference-festival closed, fittingly, with a clavichord recital by Sykes in Anabel Taylor Chapel, with music by C. P. E. Bach, Haydn and Beethoven. Two days before, with light streaming through the stained glass, an organ recital in the chapel had thunderously inaugurated the festivities. Now, in the dark of night with the organ looming above in shadow, a hushed urgency prevailed, and the collective energy of an intently listening audience was palpable. Here I must be careful, for overly enthusiastic praise of Sykes's performance could easily be read – with our sceptical academic impulses – as hyperbole. Yet, in searching to account for it, words like ‘oracular’ or ‘mystical’ come to mind. His rendering of three C. P. E. Bach sonatas – Wq65/17 in G minor, Wq55/6 in G major and Wq55/5 in F major – was probing and free. Beethoven's bagatelles Op. 33 Nos. 1 and 6 were niedlich yet not naive. But of Sykes's performance of the last item of the programme, Haydn's Andante and Variations in F minor, hXVII:6, the virtues are unspeakable; the audience sat in stunned silence afterwards and several people wept silently. The poignancy of the encore, J. S. Bach's C major prelude from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, was almost overwhelming: to hear this piece played quite simply after one's emotional guard had been so expertly and completely dismantled was a revelation. The cult of the clavichord lives.

Through the many varied performances, this conference-festival justified Richards's opening words: that C. P. E. Bach's music ‘speaks to us with vigour and brilliance, and it still has the power to persuade and to move’. In the papers, dichotomies of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music historiography were amply troped: ‘representation’ versus ‘expression’, the shift from a primacy of texted vocal genres towards ‘abstract’ instrumental music, and stylistic or aesthetic descriptors like ‘empfindsam’ and ‘galant’ that contrast implicitly, on either end, with ‘baroque’ and ‘classic(al)’. Presenters variously embraced and employed, rejected, critiqued or modified these notions; yet the fact that such fundamentals were very much at, or just below, the surface during the conference reminds us that C. P. E. Bach research rubs productively against the grain of our historiographic commonplaces for the musical eighteenth century.