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).