Across three intense days of lectures, panels and discussion, a shared concern emerged: how can topic theory continue to serve as a critical lens for interpreting musical meaning, especially when applied to lesser-known repertoires and historically nuanced cases? While the long eighteenth century formed the analytical spine of many papers, the dialogue extended well into the nineteenth, twentieth and even twenty-first centuries, maintaining conceptual cohesion through attention to narrativity, rhetoric, semiotics and hermeneutics. The following report prioritizes papers engaging with the long eighteenth century, while briefly acknowledging the broader spectrum of contributions presented throughout the event. This year’s edition gathered scholars from across Europe and the Americas, representing diverse methodological lineages and disciplinary intersections. The shared emphasis on music as a vehicle of expression demonstrated the continued vitality of topic theory not only as an analytical framework, but also as a means of exploring musical identity.

The conference began with Águeda Pedrero-Encabo (Universidad de Valladolid), who advocated a narratological approach to topic theory. Analysing Manuel Blasco de Nebra’s sonatas, she proposed a typology of laments and outlined two narrative paths for the pastoral lament. The first session (‘Around the Sonata’) then highlighted repertoire from the long eighteenth century and the early romantic period, highlighting the interpretative possibilities of topical analysis when applied to questions of formal nuance and stylistic hybridity.

Miguel Arnaiz Molina (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) began with a study of dance topics as concluding markers in Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas. He showed how specific dance topoi are not in fact limited to closing gestures, and that their placement is linked to specific rhetorical strategies. Arnaiz drew attention to what he termed a ‘modal contraposition’ at key formal junctures, which serves to introduce a dance-like character that is semantically marked. His distinction between ratio facilis and ratio difficilis offered a model for how topical meaning may be contingent on structural placement. François Vijay Ratiney (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) analysed Sebastián de Albero’s keyboard works, showing how sacred and secular idioms – organ styles, guitar techniques and dance gestures – coexist and thus reflect a dual musical identity. Cristina González Rojo (Columbia University) concluded the session by moving forward chronologically with a topical reading of the first movement from Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25. Drawing on Allanbrook’s idea of the ‘expressive surface’, González Rojo interpreted the first-theme group as marked by ombra characteristics. These are juxtaposed with a second group structured as a progressive pastoral arc, moving from serenade to a folk-like duet. Particularly striking was her analysis of the codetta as a hybrid zone – what she termed ‘pastoral ombra’ – and her observation that the recapitulation reverses the earlier trajectory. Her conclusion, resonating with a comment from Márta Grabócz (Université de Strasbourg) in discussion, stressed the need to reconsider and perhaps redefine topical categories when addressing nineteenth-century works.

Session 2 (‘Classical-Romantic Landscapes’) expanded the geographical and stylistic scope, presenting stimulating case studies on the recycling and recontextualizing of topical materials in later genres, albeit with varying levels of analytical depth and focus.

Christine E. Wisch (Indiana University) opened with an analysis of the Vals by Ángel Inzenga (died 1860), examining how the composer recontextualized inherited forms by channelling Mozartean models. She proposed that the piece’s idiom recalls the minuet more than the romanticized waltz tradition, suggesting a latent dialogue with eighteenth-century antecedents. Isis Victoria Cabrera (University of North Texas) turned to nineteenth-century Cuba with a paper on the salon music of Ignacio Cervantes (1847–1905), examining how European form-functional frameworks intersect with Creole idioms. Cabrera identified a blend of cantabile and contredanse topoi. By framing the contredanse as a new topic, she cast salon music as a medium for cultural negotiation – both aesthetic and political. The final paper of the day, by Iliana Fuentes Ordaz (Universidad de las Américas Puebla), shifted to the Quartetto Studio Classico by Mexican composer Guadalupe Olmedo (1854–1899). Drawing on data from the Yale–Classical Archives Corpus, Fuentes applied statistical comparisons to trace stylistic similarities between Olmedo’s quartet and the music of canonical figures such as Chopin, Liszt, Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart. While the numerical findings suggested various degrees of resemblance, the musical implications were left underdeveloped.

On the second day, Joan Grimalt (Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya) proposed expanding topic theory using four tools: topical fields, styles, isotopies and maps. Drawing on his Mapping Musical Signification (Cham: Springer, 2020), he framed analysis as hermeneutic and interpretative. Isotopies, as recurring sign clusters, were illustrated with reference to the music of Schubert and Schumann. Grimalt argued that interpretation – not signification – grounds musical meaning. Responding to a pointed question from Melanie Plesch (University of Melbourne) about audience recognition across cultural boundaries, Grimalt insisted on music’s interpretative openness rather than its inherent semantic force: ‘Music is not doing anything’, he proposed. ‘We are interpreting it.’

Martin Čurda (Ostravská Univerzita) explored narrative trajectories in Mozart’s concertos k449, 488 and 491, where opening topics establish expressive orders that are challenged by styles like tempesta or ombra. His presentation vividly showed how topoi drive musical drama. My presentation (Ana Llorens, Universidad Complutense de Madrid) shifted the focus to Luigi Boccherini’s vocal works, exploring how topoi are deployed to build emotional and dramatic coherence. I analysed how recurring gestures – including string textures and harmonic colouring – function semantically, often straddling affective and topical categories. I placed special emphasis on ‘instrumental impersonation’, through which an orchestral phrase can recall dramatic characters that are not present on stage, for instance by including the ‘love duet’ topic. Luis López Ruiz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) brought a semiotic lens to bear on the 1819 Misa de difuntos by Lorenzo Nielfa (1783–1861), adapting Greimas’s semiotic square to trace evolving polarities between light and darkness, body and spirit. His reading mapped a trajectory from ombra-laden openings to sacred hymn textures and brilliant fugal styles, culminating in a nuanced analysis of the ‘Lacrimosa’ and ‘Offertory’ as areas of stylistic contrast and rhetorical tension. López’s model illuminated how topoi act relationally, rather than existing as fixed signs. Małgorzata Grajter (Akademia Muzyczna im. Grażyny i Kiejstuta Bacewiczów, Łódź) examined the Sonata in G minor, Op. 15 No. 2, by João Domingos Bomtempo (1775–1842), arguing that its funeral-march finale offers resolution rather than premonition – in contrast to the equivalent movements by Beethoven and Chopin.

Subsequent sessions turned toward modern repertoires. In session 4 (‘Music in the Silver Age’) Ana Calonge Conde (Universidad de Valladolid) considered the lullaby as a recurring topos in twentieth-century Spanish music. Papers from María Nagore Ferrer (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Teresa Albero (Universitat Politècnica de València) focused on rhetorical and poetic framing in Spanish song, offering insights into national style and expressive vocabulary. Later, Paula del Brío Fernández (Universidad de Valladolid) and Laura Touriñán Morandeira (Instituto de Historia, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) dealt with topics connoting exoticism.

In session 5 (‘American Perspectives’) Melanie Plesch recontextualized European topics in the music of Ginastera, while Ignacio Juan Gassmann (Conservatorio Superior de Música Carlos Giraudo, Marcos Juárez, presenting online) traced rhetorical codes in the piano works of Juan Bautista Massa (1885–1938). Lola Fernández Marín (Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid) presented a richly detailed analysis of the zapateado style in Albéniz’s El Puerto, identifying a constellation of stylistic features that linked this urban dance form not only to flamenco and jarabe, but also to older European models such as the canario, the giga and even the muñeira. Claudio Ramírez Uribe (Universidad de Guadalajara) proposed a new taxonomy of ‘villancicos de negro mariano’, emphasizing the role of racialized language and Marian iconography in constructing Afro-Christian devotional identities. Ricardo Escorcio Pereira (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) revisited mythological representation in Francisco Rodrigo Arto’s Akelarre (1993), detailing the alignment between the composer’s narrative strategy and the ombra and tempesta topics. Closing the session, Adrián Álvarez Gálvez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) considered existential emptiness as a musical topic in the work of contemporary Cuban composer Eduardo Morales Caso. The day concluded with a lecture-recital on Ignaz Jan Paderewski.

Márta Grabócz’s keynote address on the third day synthesized several of the conference’s themes with reference to her long-standing work on narrative and semiotics. Arguing that topic theory must evolve alongside music’s changing semiotic and narrative needs, she demonstrated how analytical systems devised for particular musical styles could – and should – be reshaped to engage repertoires from other centuries. Session 6 (‘Theoretical and Hermeneutic Approaches’) then offered a further reference to classical-era framing: Enrique Igoa Mateos (Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid) proposed adapting the rhetorical category of dispositio to a post-facto analysis of his own music, while Paulo Ferreira de Castro (Centro de Estudos em Música, Universidade Nova de Lisboa) considered how well terms like ‘topic’ and ‘intonation’ translate into the contemporary musical world. Joan Francesc Vidal Arasa (Conservatori Profesional de Música Tortosa) discussed the pedagogical applications of topic theory, and Alejandro Mateo García (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Iván García Jimeno (Universidad de Valladolid) analysed classical narrative structures found within video-game music.

The final three sessions were centred on modern repertoire, contributing perspectives on narrativity and symbolism in contemporary concert works and quotation, character and nationalism in late twentieth-century Spanish music. Several speakers took topic theory into popular and world-music contexts, suggesting its elasticity as a tool for cultural critique. Finally, the last session circled back to eighteenth-century territory: Javier Gándara Feijóo (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) addressed Galician identity across colonial repertoires, while Carlota González Sánchez-Moliní (Universidad de Valladolid) and Rolf Bäcker (Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya) analysed orientalist and nomadic codes, often inherited from later eighteenth-century and early romantic sources.

The concluding roundtable affirmed that while topic theory began as a tool for decoding eighteenth-century style, it continues to evolve. The conference showed not only its analytical reach, but its ongoing capacity to question assumptions, traverse geographies and invite interdisciplinary dialogue. A third conference on topics and Hispanic music is planned for spring 2027 at the Universidad de Valladolid.