Around eighty scholars and students took the opportunity to explore new perspectives on the encounters between national styles in eighteenth-century music when they gathered for a one-day symposium convened by Stephen Grant, Erin Helyard and David R. M. Irving at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. Discussions of the contests and rapprochements between French and Italian styles during the eighteenth century have often centred on either the reception of Italian influences in France, or the development of the ‘mixed style’ amongst German composers in the early and mid-eighteenth century. However, less attention has been given to the practicalities of how these confrontations were worked out on a day-to-day basis between the musicians who had to negotiate them, whether as performers or as composers. These practicalities were a focus of the first session, which brought together a cohesive group of papers exploring how encounters between the two styles played out in the daily realities of interaction between musicians of different national traditions – French, Italian, German, Bohemian and others – where they came into professional and social contact at two German courts. These ranged from the relatively collegial in Dresden to the outright hostile in Württemberg.

Samantha Owens (Victoria University of Wellington) opened the session with a fascinating account of the richly documented conflict between rival factions of German and Italian musicians at the Württemberg Hofkapelle. In Württemberg, as at many other German courts, German musicians were paid much less than their Italian counterparts, were less preferred for leadership roles and deeply resented the intrusion of foreigners who differed from them in religion as well as in language and musical style. In contrast, Shelley Hogan (University of Melbourne) explored the ultimately much more productive mixing of French and Italian influences under Augustus II the Strong. While much attention has been given to the roles of leading musicians of the Dresden Hofkapelle such as Heinichen, Volumier and Pisendel in developing the ‘vermischter Geschmack’, Hogan argued that the court records suggest how more junior personnel, who often shared a desk with colleagues of quite different backgrounds and training, were also significant in the process of consolidating the new style. The Dresden situation was also investigated by Janice Stockigt (University of Melbourne), who drew on her intimate knowledge of the court archives and surviving manuscript music holdings to consider the significance of language choices in the scores of Jan Dismas Zelenka and his contemporaries. Analysis of a number of examples showed how the selection of French or Italian for work titles, part names and other annotations may be significant for interpreting the stylistic intention of individual compositions in an environment where multiple national styles and stylistic hybrids coexisted.

In contrast to the papers of the first session, the keynote address by Neal Zaslaw (Cornell University) focused on French reception of the Italian style. An examination of key moments in the numerous disputes over the course of the century, from François Raguenet's Paralèle des Italiens et des François in 1702 up to the Revolution, made clear how little these debates generally had to do with the audible reality of music, and how much they instead reflected the political and social contexts which informed them. Indeed, given how little actual Italian music was heard in France – in stark contrast to the German courts discussed in the opening session, with their ample representation of Italian musicians and repertory – Italian music was almost of necessity constructed as an ‘imaginary other’ which functioned mainly as a proxy in the cultural polemics of the ancien régime. Emblematic of this disconnect between the debates and the music that was ostensibly their subject is the absurdity of the ‘apples and oranges’ comparison between French tragédie en musique and Italian opera buffa, which famously generated so much heat and so little light in the querelle des bouffons of the 1750s.

Another group of papers more directly addressed matters of composition and performance. David Irving (University of Melbourne) showed off his expertise as a scholar-performer by including live demonstrations in his discussion of the historical evidence for the French bow hold. This bow hold involved placing the thumb under the hair of the bow, or under the frog, with the three middle fingers on top of the stick and the fifth finger beneath or on the side of the stick. It was in use in France for both violin and viol from the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, but, despite the prevalence of historically informed techniques in recent decades, remains relatively little used. To my surprise, and I think that of others present, in Irving's live demonstration comparing the French and the more familiar Italian bow holds, it was the apparently lighter French grip which produced the ‘meatier’ sound.

The often-contentious intersection between performance practices and notation practices was the subject of a paper from John O'Donnell (Monash University), who revisited the question of J. S. Bach's notation of rhythm in the French majestic style. A comparison of manuscript versions of Contrapunctus VI from Die Kunst der Fuge with the printed publication suggests that Bach's approach to overdotting and its representation in notation may have changed both before and after the piece appeared in print. Returning to the topic of French rapprochement with the Italian style, David Tunley (University of Western Australia) showed through a discussion of Louis-Nicolas Clérambault's cantata Orphée (1710) how the composer was able to find an effective musical compromise by accommodating the requirements of French literary style and rules of text-setting to the harmonic warmth and brilliance of the Italian cantata genre.

Following the day's presentations, the orphic theme continued with a performance of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's two-act chamber opera La Descente d'Orphée aux Enfers (1686), presented by staff and students of the Early Music Studio at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, in the intimate space of the Grant Street Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts. This was a very apt way to conclude the symposium, given Charpentier's role as a bridge between Italian and French tastes, and as a significant ‘early adopter’ of Italian elements in French music. The three convenors of the symposium took active roles in the production, Erin Helyard (well known to Australian audiences as Artistic Director of the Sydney-based historical performance company Pinchgut Opera) directing from the harpsichord, David Irving leading the violins and Stephen Grant as vocal and language coach. The largely student cast was led by the fine Australian haute-contre Timothy Reynolds, as guest professional, in the title role. The very effective production, directed by the University of Melbourne's Jane Davidson, did not attempt to recreate historical modes of staging, but was decidedly historically informed in its careful attention to the meaningful interaction of music, text declamation and movement.