For the past twenty years the Spanish scholar and harpsichordist Luisa Morales has organized an international festival of Spanish keyboard music in three small towns in the Mediterranean province of Almería: Garrucha, Vera and Mojácar. The Festival Internacional de Música de Tecla Española, or FIMTE, as it is now universally known, has four strands: concerts, courses, publications and, for fourteen of those twenty years, symposia on varied aspects of Spanish keyboard music. They are named after Diego Fernández Caparrós, who was born in Vera in 1701 and who built harpsichords for Queen Isabel Farnese, the Infante don Gabriel, the Duchess of Osuna, and Farinelli, who took one of Fernández's instruments back with him to Italy.

In the early years the focus of the symposia was on identifying and cataloguing instruments of Spanish origin and making the repertory better known. But since then the sessions have ranged widely, from Cabezón to Soler, Albéniz and Granados. The six volumes of proceedings (a seventh is in preparation) have joined the mainstream of scholarly literature, and the symposia themselves have become the go-to forum for anyone with a serious interest in Spanish keyboard instruments and their repertory and a fondness for the landscape, seascape and hospitality of southern Spain.

For the fourteenth edition of the symposium, we returned to the subject of the seventh (2006) and eighth (2007), published as Domenico Scarlatti en España, edited by Luisa Morales (Garrucha: Asociación Cultural LEAL, 2009). No apology is needed for revisiting such an important – and enigmatic – figure in eighteenth-century music. A great deal has happened in the intervening years. We have lost three more of the scholars who built on the legacy of Ralph Kirkpatrick – Christopher Hail, Roberto Pagano and Joel Sheveloff – but a new generation is emerging who are bringing new perspectives and insights. Nevertheless, hard facts about Scarlatti are as hard to come by as ever, and many if not most of Sheveloff's ‘tercentenary frustrations’ continue to frustrate (‘Domenico Scarlatti: Tercentenary Frustrations’, The Musical Quarterly 71/4 (1985), 399–436, and ‘Domenico Scarlatti: Tercentenary Frustrations (Part II)’, The Musical Quarterly 72/1 (1986), 90–118).

As is the way with conferences, greater coherence emerges as the papers are read and discussed, and one of the great advantages of embedding the symposium within a week-long festival is the opportunity to debate some of these issues at the instrument and to hear theory put into practice. All of the papers we heard in Mojácar fell into at least one of the three problem areas identified by Enrico Baiano and Marco Moiraghi in the subtitle of their book Le sonate di Domenico Scarlatti: contesto, testo, interpretazione (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2014).

As regards context, the age-old issues concerning Scarlatti's musical language, both inherited and acquired, continue to fascinate. In terms of antecedents, Baiano (Conservatorio Domenico Cimarosa, Avellino) reminded us that Scarlatti was from Naples and that Neapolitans were known for their bizarre musical language. Jean-Jacques Bouchard reported in his Voyage dans le Royaume de Naples (1632) that ‘all Neapolitans have a grain of madness’ and described their singing style as ‘extremely extravagant . . . running, then suddenly stopping, leaping up and down, and throwing out all the voice with force and then retracting it suddenly’. Whether or not all Neapolitans were mad, Baiano argued that fragmentation, variety and contrast are undeniably features of their keyboard style. Frescobaldi recommended flexibility of tempo to bring out the sharply contrasting episodes in his toccatas; Scarlatti needs to be positioned within that tradition as some of his sonatas (my italics) display those characteristics. Baiano's performance of eight of them (k96, 41, 3, 132, 115, 516, 295 and 119) made a convincing case for this highly rhetorical and thrillingly gestural approach.

When it comes to Scarlatti's Spanish style, we were fortunate to have with us the doyenne of Scarlatti scholarship, Emilia Fadini (Conservatorio Milano), who drew attention to the presence in some sonatas (again, my italics) of modal forms within an overall tonal framework. She illustrated her points with astonishing panache at the keyboard. She was taken to task for using anachronistic terminology (flamenco and cante jondo are both nineteenth-century constructs) and for attributing their use to Manuel de Falla, who, contrary to popular belief, never associated them with Scarlatti. But the harmonic and melodic features she illustrated (Dorian mode, Phrygian tetrachord, minor and augmented seconds, profuse repetition, sudden changes of key, incisive rhythmic effects) are undeniably there in the music. The question is, how specific are they to the kinds of indigenous music that Scarlatti might have encountered when he moved to Spain?

Luisa Morales (University of Melbourne and Universitat de Lleida) argued persuasively that Scarlatti's ‘Spanish style’ has too often been viewed through the prism of Alhambrism and flamenquismo. She locates the origins of his ‘Spanish style’ in French operatic representations of oriental music from Lully to Rameau (as in the latter's Les Indes Galantes, 1735). This approach is consistent with arguments she has made elsewhere (not least in her doctoral dissertation, recently completed at the University of Melbourne) that Scarlatti is more likely to have encountered Spanish dance forms in the theatre, specifically in entr'actes or entremeses, than in the taverns he is often supposed to have frequented.

Morales illustrated the underlying presence of dance forms in some (!) of the sonatas in an extremely poised performance of five of them with the dancer Cristóbal Salvador: k491 (bolero), 376 (seguidilla), 234 (fandango), 209 (jota) and 380 (bolero). The contrast with Enrico Baiano's approach could not have been greater, but the following evening Mariana Prjevalskaya reminded us that there is also a Russian school of pianism which sees the Scarlatti sonata primarily as a showcase for virtuosity: more ‘ten hundred devils’ than ‘ingenious jesting with art’. Therese de Goede (Conservatorium van Amsterdam) drew our attention to a potentially important guide to contemporary keyboard technique in the form of treatises on continuo playing by Gaspar Sanz (Instrucción de música sobre la guitarra española (Zaragoza: Herederos de Diego Dormer, 1674)) and Joseph de Torres (Reglas generales de acompañar en órgano, clavicordio y harpa (Madrid: Imprenta de Música, 1702; second, enlarged edition, 1736)). The latter is particularly interesting for its discussion of recitative, arpeggiation and the addition of acciaccature, perhaps offering clues as to how these features might be applied to Scarlatti.

Emilia Fadini is perhaps best known for her much-delayed edition of Scarlatti, the first volume of which appeared in 1978. But there was great excitement as we heard that volume 10 is at third-proof stage and will appear towards the end of 2019. This will now be the penultimate volume, will contain only the Essercizi per cembalo and has been edited by the co-editor of volume 9, Marco Moiraghi (Università di Genova). The Essercizi have emerged in recent years as a test case for methods of analysing the transmission of Scarlatti's sonatas, and Moiraghi gave a masterly overview of the textual complexities of this collection. He has clearly examined with immense care and attention to detail all of the surviving eighteenth-century witnesses (Essercizi, Roseingrave, Boivin, Orfeó Català, Paris Arsenal and several others) and collated them with exceptional philological rigour. His conclusion is that many of the high number of textual variants are not the result of error: rather, they are authorial variants reflecting progressive phases of correction and emendation. As a result, for the first time a number of sonatas will appear in up to three different versions. Publication of volume 10 promises to be a landmark in Scarlatti editions and will set the standard for the further work that is needed on the other 525 sonatas in the canon.

Moiraghi's paper also underlined the timeliness of my own proposal (Barry Ife, Guildhall School of Music & Drama) for a collaborative project to collate all of the eighteenth-century sources of Scarlatti's sonatas and create a central online repository and variorum commentary which can be scaled up as new witnesses come to light. As if on cue, another Italian scholar, Giovanna Carugno (Conservatorio Ottorino Respighi, Latina) announced the discovery of a new manuscript source of k41 in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma. This elegant paper was a salutary reminder that each of the sonatas started life as an individual composition, and was a welcome endorsement of Ife's first law of textual transmission, namely that a compilation is not a single text and that nothing we can say about the source, transmission or authority of any single item in that compilation can safely be applied to any other item, or to the collection as a whole.

Context for Scarlatti is not just musical, however: several of the speakers showed equal interest in his political contexts, then and now. Like many Spanish intellectuals, Luisa Morales is trying to strip away the many layers of cliché that have disfigured the face of Spanish culture. Her positioning of Scarlatti within the cultural politics of King Felipe V (reigned 1700–1746) was particularly interesting in this regard. Following the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Felipe was keen to promote a specifically Spanish culture to restore the monarchy's prestige at home and abroad. For Morales the gestation and publication of the Essercizi (1738) as a collection that encompasses French, Italian and Spanish styles are best understood in this context.

Other speakers drew equal attention to the tension between nationalism and internationalism around the turn of the twentieth century and to the importance of gender in the revival of interest in Scarlatti at the end of the nineteenth century. Xoán M. Carreira (MundoClasico.com) argued forcefully that Granados's twenty-six transcriptions for piano (two volumes; Madrid: Vidal y Limona, [1904] and [1905]) have wrongly been interpreted, partly on the basis of Felipe Pedrell's prologue, as an attempt to rediscover a lost Spanish musical autarchy when, in fact, Scarlatti's music had enjoyed a strong line of transmission through Clementi and Czerny for nearly a century.

We need to be careful about creating false dichotomies here and elsewhere. Of course, Scarlatti was a cosmopolitan composer with an international reputation promoted by international artists and composers, including Brahms. But the timing of Granados's edition cannot be isolated from its own political and cultural context: the first Scarlatti sonatas ever published in Spain, coming one year before the launch of Longo's edition in Milan, and when the so-called Generation of 1898 was collectively agonizing over the decline of Spain and Spanish culture.

Granados was, of course, by no means the only pianist to transcribe Scarlatti for the piano: Laia Martín (Universidade de Aveiro) has so far tracked down nineteen transcriptions of Scarlatti sonatas published between 1791 and 1921. These have given her a context for Granados's own versions, which require performances of much greater energy and vigour. This approach was a feature of her lecture-recital, in which four of Granados's transcriptions responded to recordings of their equivalent originals played on copies of historical instruments: Nos 7/k102 (fortepiano), 11/k110 (clavichord), 21/k552 (pipe organ) and 24/k139 (fortepiano).

Elizabeth Kertesz (University of Melbourne) and Michael Christoforidis (University of Melbourne) sent in a fascinating coda to the ongoing discussion about stereotypes: a survey of dance adaptations of Scarlatti on stage and screen from The Good-Humoured Ladies by the Ballets Russes (Massine/Bakst, 1917) through Alfredo Casella's Scarlattiana to David Lichine's Corrida (1955). Some of the more toe-curling clichés showed how entrenched exotic stereotypes can be, and how difficult it is to root them out.

On the related question of gender in the performance of Scarlatti, Francesc Cortès (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), speaking by Skype, emphasized the important role played by the German pianist and pupil of Liszt, Sophie Menter (1846–1918), who included Scarlatti sonatas in her recital programmes in Spain during the 1890s. She was one of several other female interpreters discussed in absentia by Emma Virginia García Gutiérrez (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, Madrid) who were praised at the time for their ‘masculine’ delivery of what was usually dismissed, by male critics, as ‘feminine’ music.

The quality and variety of the presentations and discussions at this year's symposium reflected the quality and variety of Scarlatti's own work. The whole of eighteenth-century music is there, writ small, in many combinations and configurations. Much remains to be done before we can claim fully to understand Scarlatti's significance as a composer and his impact on the keyboard literature from the eighteenth century to the present day, but as new avenues of enquiry are opened, his stature will surely continue to grow.