s was available both to aid in choosing which sessions to attend and to compensate for those that were missed.3 different sessions aimed to present the most recent international tendencies in Baroque research. Some, organized along national lines, covered Baroque music in Italy and England in particular, but also in France and Eastern Europe; others were devoted to source studies, patronage, musical analysis, and research methodologies. A special session, a somewhat unusual compliment at a conference like this, was dedicated to Women and Music, and seemed to promise, in the fascinating title of Linda Austern's paper, The Siren, the Muse, and the God of Love, and with the participation of Jane Berdes (whose paper was read by Elsie Arnold), Suzanne Cusick, and 270 Lydia Hamessley, somewhat more than the sympathetic speakers could offer in the way of new and significant information. papers and roundtables dedicated to English sources seemed a good deal richer in documentation and original prospectives for research. Already the first session of the conference, devoted to Instrumental Music Manuscripts of the Seventeenth Century, offered, in addition to studies on the instrumental music of Giuseppe Colombi at Modena (John Seuss), the instrumental sources of Antonio Bertali (Niels Martin Jensen), and on the collections of instrumental music in the Lichtenstein archive in Kromeriz (Jiri Sehnal),4 a paper by Peter Allsop on English sources of Italian instrumental music, which also clarified a series of old misunderstandings regarding the structure and terminology of the Italian sonata as it was used in English territory. Two further sessions were more directly concerned with English musical patronage. first, entitled Sources and Patronage in England, offered papers by Robert Thompson (on the singer F. Withey's role as copyist at Oxford, 1670-1727), Jane Clark (on the intricate relationship between art and the espionage activities of the nobleman 3 Fourth Biennial Conference on Baroque Music, Abstracts of Papers Read and Conference Programme, edited by Geoffrey Chew, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London (Egham, 199o). 4 At a later session, Senhal presented another paper, on the musical sources of Hradisko in Moravia, which provided a small taste of the surprises in store for musicologists from the unknown archives of the East that finally are beginning to be open to the West. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.137 on Fri, 27 May 2016 06:02:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms