BACH AND MOZART: CONNECTIONS, PATTERNS, PATHWAYS STANFORD UNIVERSITY, 13–16 FEBRUARY 2020

Abstract

On awarm, sunny Thursday in February about sixty eighteenth-century scholars and students gathered from the United States and around the world on the picturesque Stanford University campus for the first-ever joint meeting of the American Bach Society and the Mozart Society of America. The conference was small (twenty-one presentations divided over six sessions), but the scope of enquiry was impressive. A busy four days included formal papers, two specially designed panel sessions, three concerts, meetings for both societies, a tour of Stanford’s Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH) Lab, and plenty of opportunities for old friends and new acquaintances alike to exchange ideas and enjoy each other’s company. Individual presentations explored questions of social context, reception history and musical form, as well as links between Bach andMozart. Especially welcome in the design of the programmewas its focus on the long eighteenth century. Following a lovely open-air reception in the inner courtyard of the Braun Music Center, festivities commenced on the first evening with a panel discussion ‘in lieu of a keynote address’ centred on Karol Berger’s seminal book Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, \uf645\uf643\uf643\uf64a). Introduced and moderated by Andrew Talle (Northwestern University), this event included four invited presentations followed by an open discussion. Karol Berger (Stanford University) spoke first, offering a welcome summary of his book’s main thesis – ‘that it was only in the later eighteenth century that European art music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously’ – and taking the opportunity to renew and deepen the questions the book poses about the relationship between music, time and history. My contribution (Jessica Waldoff, College of the Holy Cross) used Frank Kermode, E. T. A. Hoffmann and William Weber to focus on the sense of an ending in both musical narratives and narratives about music, and to pose questions about causation. Why does this shift occur at this time? What is the relationship between events internal to the music and external to the music? To what degree, for example, might we understand events in music history – say, the rise of the classical concert repertory that would eventually standardize into a musical canon – as a product of this new ‘modern’ conception of time? Bruce Alan Brown (University of Southern California) offered a stimulating reflection that invited Berger to respond to books written since the publication of Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, especially Robert Gjerdingen,Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, \uf645\uf643\uf643\uf64a) and Edward Klorman,Mozart’s Music of Friends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, \uf645\uf643\uf644\uf649). He drew on Berger’s analysis of time inMozart’s operas to explore temporal structures and representations of the sublime in the first-movement development section of Mozart’s Symphony No. \uf646\uf64c, K\uf648\uf647\uf646. Robert Marshall (Brandeis University), whose enduring image of ‘Bach the Progressive’ was certainly relevant, focused commun icat ion s