As a historian engaged with musicology, it seems to me that the discipline is in its golden age. The royal road from the musical past to the musical present built in the first century or so of its academic existence no longer contains all the traffic. But thanks to the earlier efforts at disciplinary definition, musicologists share an enormous amount of knowledge, understand what colleagues are doing and are able to face the challenge of understanding music-making outside of the Western cultures from which the field of musicology – and ethnomusicology – emerged. Rarely has a discipline been so well equipped for the task of deconstructing itself. But deconstruction (of canons, grand narratives and the like) accompanies construction: musicology has built and expanded, adding on more sources and more methods rather than abandoning the old ones. Given this happy state, it seems worthwhile to reconsider some of the cultural work that writing about music did before the discipline cohered in the nineteenth century, so that we can consider from a longer perspective why people tried to ‘discipline’ musical knowledge in the first place.

The VI Concertos in Seven Parts published by Benjamin Cooke under Alessandro Scarlatti's name in 1740 have long been suspected of being either arrangements or works by a different composer. Close study of the sources, some of which have only recently come to light, shows them to be arrangements of sonate a quattro, four composed by Alessandro Scarlatti and two by his younger brother Francesco. The unacknowledged compiler and arranger of the set was almost certainly Charles Avison, who in addition made a significant compositional intervention. The publication of the concertos formed part of a pioneering strategy on Cooke's part whereby he acquired, and under the protection of a royal privilege engraved, significant works in manuscript owned (but not composed) by individual musicians within his circle. Among the latter was John Christopher Pepusch, whose role in the first publication of Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas k31–42 is described for the first time.

Recent performance projects have called into question the use of the sixteen-foot violone in a wide range of instrumental and concerted vocal works, particularly those by J. S. Bach. In performances of music by Bach and his contemporaries, artists have on occasion opted to exclude sixteen-foot participation in the bass line, often citing terminological issues as a reason. While acknowledging that the use of the term violone in scores and parts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is problematic, this article casts doubt on the conclusions reached by these performers and on the scholarly writings underpinning them. A careful examination of instrumental designations employed in autograph parts and scores provides important clues as to the proper employment of a sixteen-foot contrabass instrument in many works. Further illumination on this matter is provided by terminology in contemporary treatises. Analysis of this material shows that the function of the bass line to which the term violone (or any of its regional variants) was assigned was a crucial determining factor in interpreting that part as either an eight- or sixteen-foot bass line. In other words, modern determinations should be made according to whether the designation indicates a non-transposing instrument serving primarily as the bass member of an instrumental choir or a transposing instrument whose main purpose is reinforcing the continuo line at the lower octave.

The plagal cadence has long been a significant concept within musical discourse, but that discourse contains no convincing explanation of why the progression should be characterized as ‘plagal’. This article elucidates the meaning of the term ‘plagal cadence’ by examining its introduction into a mid-eighteenth-century Parisian debate over the nature of what would come to be called tonality instigated by Charles-Henri de Blainville's proposal of the ‘mixed mode’, a supplement to the major and minor modes. Owing to the properties of his new mode's scale, which corresponds to the Phrygian mode, Blainville identified the plagal cadence as the proper conclusion for pieces in the mixed mode. Curiously, although Blainville's work appears to contain the first published articulation of the term, he employs it as if his readers were already familiar with the ‘plagal cadence’. This article explains that oddity, finding that Blainville misread earlier accounts of plainchant as saying that plagal modes were characterized by the interval of the descending fourth. In conclusion, consideration of the controversy regarding the mixed mode and plagal cadence reveals that those historical disagreements bear striking similarities to current debates over the significance and function of the plagal cadence in theories of harmony.

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.

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.