The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), together with the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, convened at Pittsburgh's historic Omni William Penn Hotel for lively discussion and debate. For those readers unfamiliar with this annual conference, it is a monumental affair, featuring an average of seventeen panels during each allotted session. Societies affiliated with ASECS sponsor many of these panels. I offer an overview of presentations related to music, followed by a summary of two keynote talks, and conclude by considering some panels pertaining to other disciplines.

One of the many societies affiliated with ASECS is the Mozart Society of America, which presented ‘Mozart and the Promise of the Enlightened Stage’, a panel chaired by Edmund J. Goehring (University of Western Ontario). Katharina Clausius (University of Cambridge), Laurel E. Zeiss (Baylor University) and Larry Wolff (New York University) gave papers respectively on the translation of poetry into opera, the power of the senses in Mozart's Da Ponte Operas, and the use of classical form to moderate absolutist rage in Turkish scenarios (Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Zaide, an unfinished opera composed in 1780). Mozart was also represented in ‘Teaching the Eighteenth Century: A Poster Session’, with Laurel E. Zeiss's poster ‘What Makes Mozart Mozart? Comparing Two Duets’. Her study contrasted eighteenth- and twenty-first-century listeners’ reactions to Martín y Soler's ‘Pace, caro mio sposo’ (Una cosa rara) and Mozart's ‘Che soave zeffiretto’ (Le nozze di Figaro), both dating from 1786. She demonstrated how changes in listening practices and the cultivation of the canon have influenced reception, finding that eighteenth-century audiences perceived Mozart's music as too artful (‘detailed’), and Soler's as more amenable to public performance (‘sweet’ and ‘graceful’). Twenty-first-century audiences have preferred the better-known Mozart aria over the seemingly simpler Martín y Soler.

A panel led by Larry Wolff, ‘Music and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe and Northern America’, featured topics cosmopolitan in scope, provoking those present to consider how musical practices related across continents. Discussion encompassed Baldassarre Galuppi's understanding of the galant aesthetic (Scot Buzza, University of Kentucky), the intersection of music and British imperial identity (Amy Dunagin, Yale University), the politics of French and Scandinavian opéra comique (Charlotta Wolff, Helsingin Yliopisto/University of Helsinki) and the presence of Anglo-American political songs such as Yankee Doodle in Quebec (Nathan D. Brown, Randolph-Macon College).

The North American British Music Studies Association organized the panel ‘Anglo-American Musical Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century’, which I chaired (Bethany Cencer, State University of New York at Potsdam). Papers by Nikos Pappas (University of Alabama), Joice Waterhouse Gibson (Metropolitan State University of Denver) and Christa Pehl Evans (Princeton University) examined the transformation of British musical practices in the New World. Pappas introduced an early 1750s collection of American folk hymns that circulated in villages lining Long Island Sound and the Connecticut River Valley. The hymns demonstrate English Presbyterian influence rather than the Scottish Presbyterian origins common to most nineteenth-century American hymns. Gibson emphasized the paradoxical ways in which Samuel Arnold's comic opera Inkle and Yarico perpetuated race, class and gender discrimination while simultaneously sentimentalizing anti-slavery views. Evans demonstrated how American musicians in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, copied music from both British and German print sources in the 1790s. In a panel sponsored by the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, entitled ‘Music and Song in Scotland’ (chair: Leslie Ellen Brown, Ripon College), speakers explored such themes as the ontology of Scottish airs (Andrew Greenwood, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville), depictions of bagpipes in Scottish literature and art (Vivien Estelle Williams, University of Glasgow) and the ways in which Jacobite songs have supported the creation of modern nostalgia (Elizabeth Kraft, University of Georgia).

Extending from panels devoted exclusively to music, sessions involving music and the broader arts included ‘Eighteenth-Century Freemasonry and the Arts’ (chair: Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, University of North Texas) and ‘Music, Art, Literature’, a panel sponsored by the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music (chair: Janet K. Page, University of Memphis). For the Masonic panel, I gave a paper on the similarities in governing policy and performance practice between all-male Masonic lodges and the weekly meetings of the Noblemen and Gentlemen's Catch Club in London. Through singing newly composed harmonized songs together in chorus, both Catch Club members and Freemasons attempted to realize their vision of an orderly society. The other paper on music and Freemasonry was delivered by Mary Greer (Cambridge, Massachusetts), who suggested that C. P. E. Bach ultimately chose not to make public the subscribers to his oratorio Die Israeliten in der Wüste because they were either Masonic Lodges or individual Freemasons. Reva Wolf (State University of New York at New Paltz) offered evidence that Francisco Goya was a Freemason, and argued that his participation in the brotherhood actually helps explain why Goya is often perceived as ‘modern’. Finally, Nan Wolverton (American Antiquarian Society) discussed Paul Revere's production as a Masonic artisan, and the ways in which Masonic imagery worked its way into public arenas of trade and commerce.

In the panel ‘Music, Art, Literature’ Kathryn Shanks Libin (Vassar College) discussed the place of music in the everyday lives of the Lobkowitzes (a Bohemian noble family residing in Vienna) through the lens of a watercolour painted by a family member. She touched on distinctions between town and country life and the types of domestic activities in which the family participated. Art historian Elizabeth Liebman (Chicago) explained how serinettes, or ‘bird organs’, were used to teach canaries to sing. Her research encourages a fresh approach to the character of Papageno in Die Zauberflöte. Finally, Lisa de Alwis (University of Colorado Boulder) shared her observations concerning the censorship of plays and opera texts in late eighteenth-century Vienna, including the mechanisms of the censorship process and the motivations for it.

In addition to music-oriented talks, I found the presidential address by former ASECS president Srinivas Aravamudan (Duke University) to be particularly effective in motivating scholars to use their knowledge and research activities to enact social change. Owing to illness, his talk, ‘From Enlightenment to Anthropocene’, was delivered by Felicity Nussbaum (University of California Los Angeles). Aravamudan's legacy was recognized in the roundtable ‘Celebrating the Work of Srinivas Aravamudan’, which featured colleagues from Duke, Yale, Fordham, Brown, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and Hunter College. His subsequent death in April is mourned, and he will be remembered as an influential English professor, colleague and friend to many.

Aravamudan's talk applied the philosophy of Enlightenment thinker Giambattista Vico to our current geological age, the Anthropocene, in which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate change and other environmental matters. Vico's approach to his own time affirms that the human and the natural become indistinguishable from each other, as they work in concert. Despite its associations with the dawn of modernity, the Enlightenment can also be understood as an innocent illusion that falsely depicts humanity as separate from nature and necessity. People continue wilfully to embrace the illusion that human agency is somehow above that of nature, when in reality nature is ‘recoiling’ in response to human actions. The talk became quite dismal in terms of possible future outcomes, with the Anthropocene proposed as a sort of post-human comedy in which technology and nature ultimately overcome humanity. Aravamudan questioned if humanity is paradoxically pursuing the post-human in order to produce an ending (the end of our species) simply for the sake of an ending. Responders to his talk claimed that it characterizes Vico as a critic of the Anthropocene, and frames the history of the Enlightenment as a response to climate change. The importance of using our expertise to address what may be considered the most urgent scenario facing us today was emphasized, and presented as the primary responsibility for humanities scholars.

Another stimulating keynote address was delivered by John Brewer (California Institute of Technology), with his ‘Fire and Ice: Travel and the Natural Sublime in the Age of Enlightenment’. Like Aravamudan, Brewer spoke of the environment, with a focus on unpacking the allure of eighteenth-century travel literature. He explained that the value of such texts lay not in the actual places surveyed, but in the actions of the surveyor(s) and the resulting impression that emerged. In describing the phenomenon of an erupting volcano or a snowy mountain, travel authors imbued the natural sublime with their own ideologies. Brewer gave examples of homosocial and heterosexual themes underlying male authors’ accounts of volcanic exploration. He stressed the aesthetic pleasure of travel literature in terms of both infinite sublimity and scientific systemization.

In closing, I will comment on a few interdisciplinary panels. ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’ was headed by Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Syracuse University) and Richard Schoch (Queen's University of Belfast). They have initiated an autumn weekend workshop of the same title for the Folger Institute, emphasizing the relevance of multimedia productions of Restoration Shakespeare plays for understanding textual adaptations. ‘Rethinking the Academic Conference’, sponsored by the ASECS Women's Caucus, addressed gender inequality in academia. Papers included ‘Closed Mouths Do Not Mean Closed Minds’ (Rebecca Shapiro, City University of New York) and ‘Fostering Intellectual Sociability’ (Susan Lanser, Brandeis University). In the panel ‘Sensibility: How is That Still a Thing?’ (chair: Juliet Shields, University of Washington) speakers proffered new approaches to defining eighteenth-century sensibility and sentimentality. As an alternative to the familiar classification of sensibility as a historical genre, Katherine Binhammer (University of Alberta) referred to sensibility as a mode, in which particular literary motives and conventions are used to present emotions. Stephanie DeGooyer (Willamette University) argued that sentimentality is a form that exists not for the purpose of capturing social relations, but rather for experimenting with their configurations. My conference experience concluded with the provocative panel ‘Lost and Found in the Eighteenth Century’, chaired by Stephanie Koscak (Wake Forest University), in which it was argued that the development of life insurance in eighteenth-century Britain was initiating a new relationship to property. One of the panellists, Kate Smith (University of Birmingham), extended a nod to Aravamudan's keynote address in her comment that the Anthropocene – and modernity as a whole – could be viewed as a reformulation of nature as human property, a position with potentially dire consequences.