The three words ‘networking, influencing, facilitating’ encapsulate the aims and achievements of Bach Network UK (BNUK) in its first ten years. At the instigation of Reinhard Strohm and together with John Butt and Ruth Tatlow, BNUK was founded in Oxford in 2004. Our motivating vision was to create an interdisciplinary forum that would attract profound discussion of Bach's music and bridge the scholar–performer divide. We imagined an integrated structure, powered by specialized research discussions, feeding into larger-scale meetings and being disseminated through publication. These ideas are still loosely recognizable a decade later.

Over the last two decades digital resources have proved to be extremely useful even in the humanities. Apart from library catalogues and sophisticated databases, which enable any reader from anywhere in the world to search for items and often offer free access to rare books and prints – not to mention a huge project like Google books or the diffusion of e-books as an alternative to printed materials – websites and computer programs have become an essential part of the daily work of scholars, and they keep providing wonderful opportunities to collect, analyse and compare primary (and secondary) sources.

This conference continued a series of meetings (biennial since 1994) dedicated to Telemann scholarship and held in Magdeburg, city of the composer's birth and home of the Zentrum für Telemann-Pflege und -Forschung. The theme of the conference linked it to a host of international events dedicated to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach on the occasion of his three hundredth birthday. The close relationship of Telemann to the second oldest Bach son (Telemann was his godfather) provided ample reason to bring together leading authorities on these two composers and their musical cultures. Twenty-five presentations across two days reflected what has already been written about Emanuel Bach and Telemann, what is currently being learned and what topics might fruitfully be explored in future.

On 25 January 2015 the final concert of the Resonance Early Music Festival was performed before an enthusiastic audience in the Vienna Konzerthaus. As a fitting close to the series Alessandro Quarta conducted the Concerto Romano and five singers representing the four seasons and Jove in a stunning performance of Alessandro Scarlatti's 1716 serenata La Gloria di Primavera (‘Nato è già l’austricao sole’). First heard at Naples in celebration of the birth of the Habsburg Archduke Leopold, it was performed on the evening of 19 May 1716, in the palace of Don Nicola Gaetano d’Aragona according to the libretto printed by Michele-Luigi Muzio at Naples in 1716.

Imagine you are asked in an academic meeting to name three or four prominent Spanish composers in the field of the string quartet. How many would you be able to cite? You might be tempted to answer that the quartet was in fact hardly cultivated in Spain, or you might perhaps wonder whether Boccherini could be taken to be a ‘Spanish’ composer. These potential responses to this fictional situation encapsulate well two of the historiographical preconceptions that have governed our view of this area, the first of which is, to put it in Friedhelm Krummacher's words, that Spanish composers ‘adopted a particularly abstinent attitude’ towards the genre (‘sich . . . besonders abstinent zum Streichquartett verhielten’; Geschichte des Streichquartetts, volume 2 (Laaber: Laaber, 2005), 400).

Often the most invigorating conferences are those which bring together many different specialties and integrate them within interdisciplinary panels. Such was the case with the Forty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), which took place in March in Williamsburg, Virginia. The event was enormous, with over eight hundred presenters spread among 221 panels, in addition to seven plenary sessions and other special events such as the masquerade ball hosted by the Women's Caucus. Music and other performing arts were well represented throughout the weekend; both the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music and the Mozart Society of America sponsored panels, and many papers about the arts were included in other groupings. Given the large number of papers and other events, it was impossible to attend all or even most of the offerings. However, I will give an overview of my experiences in order to convey a sense of the conference's atmosphere.

Early-music performances were a rarity in Malta until a few years ago. Slowly, over the years, harpsichords started to appear in concerts and a retired doctor began to build clavichords. During a series of fundraising concerts for the restoration of one of Valletta's oldest churches, a male-voice choir was formed to sing renaissance polyphony. This fervent activity led a local artist, Kenneth Zammit Tabona, to dream of a baroque music festival in the island's capital, Valletta. January 2013 saw the first Valletta International Baroque Festival, with concerts held in several of Valletta's baroque edifices, including the magnificent Manoel Theatre (built in 1731 and one of the oldest working theatres in Europe) and the awe-inspiring St John's Co-Cathedral, the church of the Knights of Malta. The first year was a resounding success and augured well for the future, as was confirmed in the second year of the festival.