This conference, a collaboration between the two projects ‘French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era’ at Warwick University and ‘Music in London, 1800–1851’ at King's College London, was intended to foster interdisciplinary dialogue about early melodrama. In particular, the aim was to investigate the relationship between melodramatic techniques (spoken word over or alternated with instrumental music), melodramatic aesthetics (such as strong contrasts between good and evil and extremes of emotion) and the generic category of melodrama (given to various concert and theatrical forms). While discussion necessarily engaged with phenomena either side of the thirty years specified by the title, participants focused on the period in which melodrama came to prominence as a stage genre, a period in which several of the key European traditions coincided.

People heard the surname Rameau with some frequency in 2014, which marked the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of the composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764). In classrooms and on radio broadcasts, a circumscribed set of associations comes to mind with each utterance of the name. Musicologists think of Rameau's discourses on triadic harmony and his theory of the fundamental bass (basse fondamentale). Keyboardists think of music composed by a literate organist and violinist from Dijon. Singers and dancers might also think of the many forays into choral music, ballet and opera that cemented Rameau's rise to artistic prominence during the French Enlightenment.

The biennial meeting of the American Bach Society inspired the participation of around fifty scholars, performers and other Bach enthusiasts from the United States, Canada and Germany. Organizers included Ellen Exner (University of South Carolina), Markus Rathey (Yale University), Don O. Franklin (Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh), Steven Crist (Emory University) and Reginald Sanders (Kenyon College), who deserves particular thanks for serving as local arrangements chair, a task he dispatched with characteristic aplomb. Kenyon College offered a beautiful and stimulating setting for the conference, and the American Bach Society owes a great debt of thanks to Kenyon President Sean M. Decatur and Provost Joseph L. Klesner, as well as to their Executive Assistant, Pamela J. Faust, for their warm welcome and help with logistics.

This conference coincided with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the composer's death and formed part of the Rameau Project, a large-scale multidisciplinary research programme devoted to the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau, supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and directed by Graham Sadler (University of Oxford and Birmingham Conservatoire), Alain Viala (University of Oxford) and Jonathan Williams (University of Oxford).

In every aspect of cultural theory, considering both the apparently universal aspects of our common humanity and the manifold differences between cultures and individuals is such a huge and fraught undertaking that no one conference can hope to do more than chip away at the edges of the questions raised. This is true even if the purview is limited to the historical study of eighteenth-century musical approaches to these questions. Nevertheless, chipping away at those edges is productive and stimulating, and in this spirit we converged at Oxford – part of the time at the music faculty at St Aldate’s, and part of the time at Wadham College – to discuss ‘Alterity and Universalism in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought’. The conference was organized by David R. M. Irving (Australian National University) and Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University) under the auspices of Reinhard Strohm's Balzan prize. Strohm is only the second musicologist (the other was Ludwig Finscher) to have received the Balzan award. He will pursue his ambitious project called ‘Towards a Global History of Music’ over the coming three years.

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.

Conferences organized by the Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg inevitably serve as a kind of touchstone: one tends to view the programme as a representative muster of international Mozart scholarship. Since on this occasion the organizers explicitly devoted part of the event to analysis (broadly understood as ‘scholarly work interpretation’), the October 2014 snapshot proved especially rich in insights, suggesting that the tools recently developed for the analysis of ‘galant style’ have much to offer for Mozart scholars, while ‘old-school’ source research still bears its fruits as well.

Musical performers and performing processes are relatively new objects of study if we compare them with composers and works, categories that have been at the centre of musicological concerns for a long time: so much so that in a relatively recent publication, An Introduction to Music Studies, ed. J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), the study of musical performance is presented as a field of renewal for music history and analysis.

The Sixteenth Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music (ICBM) was held at the beautiful Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Professor Thomas Hochradner and his effective team of assistants, approximately 250 participants could choose from papers and lecture-recitals that covered a wide spectrum of topics and methodologies. These included new research on notable composers, geographical influences upon musical genres and interdisciplinary approaches. The organizers also offered guided tours on one of the afternoons, which allowed participants to trace the music of the city, learn about the autographs vault of the Mozarteum, listen to the organs at the Metropolitan Church or explore the cathedral quarters (Domquartier).

The larger context of this conference was the annual festival of early music in Thuringia known as Güldener Herbst (Golden Autumn). The series of concerts, church services, guided tours and similar events in late September and early October took note of the three hundredth anniversaries of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's birth on 8 March 1714 and Philipp Heinrich Erlebach's death a few weeks later, on 17 April. Since Bach was born in Weimar (central Germany) but worked primarily in the northern cities of Berlin and Hamburg, and Erlebach, conversely, hailed from a small town in the far northwest but spent his career in Rudolstadt (about twenty miles south of Weimar), the 2014 festival focused on cultural interrelationships between the two regions, summed up in the subtitle ‘Norddeutsche Impulse’ (north German impulses).

In October 2014 scholars from Europe and North America took part in a conference dedicated to two important figures active during the eighteenth century as composers and virtuosos of the violin, to mark the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of their death: Pietro Antonio Locatelli (Bergamo, 1695–Amsterdam, 1764) and Jean-Marie Leclair l’aîné (Lyon 1697–Paris, 1764). The event was organized by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (Lucca) in partnership with the Fondazione MIA of Bergamo and the Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de Musique Romantique Française in Venice, and also with the collaboration of the Edizione Nazionale Italiana delle Opere Complete di Locatelli. Accommodated in the magnificent Sala Locatelli of the Fondazione MIA, the conference was subdivided into six sessions. First came ‘Pietro Antonio Locatelli and His Legacy’, with speakers Paola Palermo (Bergamo), Christoph Riedo (Universität Freiburg, Switzerland) and Ewa Chamczyk (Uniwersytet Warszawski), followed by ‘French Routes’, featuring Étienne Jardin (Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de Musique Romantique Française), Candida Felici (Conservatorio di Musica di Cosenza) and Paola Besutti (Università di Teramo). The third session, ‘Pierre-Marie-François de Sales Baillot’, was held to mark the bicentenary of Baillot's foundation of his séances de musique de chambre (chamber music concerts).

This conference took as its theme ‘Early Music Revivals and the Performance of Spanish Keyboard Music’. It was organized and directed by Luisa Morales, and was held concurrently with the fifteenth iteration of the Festival Internacional de Música de Tecla Española (FIMTE). The symposium and festival (usually held in October) took full advantage of Mojácar's vibrant August atmosphere, which attracts many visitors from around the world for the picturesque beauty of the fifteenth-century town and its proximity to the Mediterranean. This year the symposium, dedicated to the memory of harpsichordist Rafael Puyana, hosted speakers and performers from Australia, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain, Sweden, the United States, the United Kingdom and Venezuela.

The year 2014 marked the tercentenary of the birth of Christoph Gluck, an anniversary shared with his fellow operatic reformer Niccolò Jommelli and the most famous Bach son, Carl Philipp Emanuel. For most people, the mention of Gluck brings to mind his involvement in the reform of eighteenth-century opera and seminal works such as Orfeo ed Euridice, associations that have had the effect of minimizing Gluck's other accomplishments, including the majority of his dramatic oeuvre. The conference and festival Gluck and the Map of Eighteenth-Century Music, organized by Brian Locke and Anita Hardeman at Western Illinois University, focused less on Gluck's involvement in operatic reform than on the many ways in which he engaged with operatic and balletic traditions. Encompassing studies of genre, performance and reception history, the papers portrayed Gluck as a composer enmeshed in the musical culture of his time, whose works still leave much to be discovered by both scholars and performers.

There was a time when C. P. E. Bach's music was mostly interesting as a connection between periods of music history. Indeed, perhaps no composer was done a greater injustice by such un-useful terms as ‘pre-classical’, meant to place Bach in various grand narratives and often forcing him into the role of bearing the spirit of his father to the Viennese classics. Such fussy periodizations of eighteenth-century music history are now mostly passé. So it was a pleasure to attend this conference, held at the Faculty of Music of Oxford University, at which speakers explored the varied terrain of Bach's place in eighteenth-century keyboard culture without for the most part framing their arguments in terms of influence and legacy. They examined this most fascinating (and in some ways enigmatic) of composers on his own merits.

This conference, now in its thirtieth year, and run very capably by Katherine Hogg and Colin Colman (both Gerald Coke Handel Collection, The Foundling Museum), together with Claire Sharpe (Royal Academy of Music), is a personal favourite of mine. The variety of papers always means that one is drawn into at least one subject about which one knows almost nothing, but which invariably informs or enriches one's own area of expertise.

The multi-dimensional topic of improvisation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been explored in various recent publications and international conferences. For example, the proceedings of the conference L’improvvisazione nella musica occidentale del Settecento all’Ottocento, held at La Spezia in 2010, were published as Beyond Notes: Improvisation in Western Music of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), edited by Rudolf Rasch. Rasch (Universiteit Utrecht) was one of several participants at La Spezia who reappeared in Venice for the third in a series of conferences on improvisation, organized like the previous two by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. The first two (November 2012, 2013) dealt with different eras. ‘Musical Improvisation in the Age of Beethoven’, held over two days, brought together scholars of varying provenance, from Belgium, Canada, Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The first day of papers was followed by an evening recital from Mozart scholar and fortepianist John Irving (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance) and violinist Davide Amodio. Scott Burnham (Princeton University), scheduled to speak on the second day, was absent, but a ‘draft outline’ of his paper was read by William Caplin (McGill University) and distributed as a handout. In the face of an unreliable broadband connection, Elaine Sisman (Columbia University) read her paper over Skype and participated frequently in the other sessions.

In 1915, in the midst of war, a twenty-nine-year-old scholar by the name of Margherita Berio published an article that deplored the total lack of attention devoted to Niccolò Jommelli (1714–1774) on the bicentennial of his birth, the year before. ‘No one,’ Berio complained, ‘not even before the flogging war swept away in its own horror lives, things, memories – no one, I believe, has broken the silence around Jommelli’ (‘Un centenario silenzioso: Nicola Jommelli’, Rivista musicale italiana 22/1 (1915), 105). Berio was hopeful, however, stating that ‘an authentic glory of our [Italian] art’ had perhaps been ‘locked up, yet not suffocated’ by forgetfulness.