In the inaugural issue of this journal James Webster offered us a thoughtful meditation on the hoary, and seemingly intractable, problem of configuring the eighteenth century so that it might constitute an intelligible subject of musicological research (‘The Eighteenth Century as a Music-Historical Period?’, Eighteenth-Century Music 1/1 (2004), 47–60). Clearly, we have come a long way from the time when eighteenth-century music was oriented almost exclusively around the grand Olympian peaks of High Baroque and Viennese Classical styles. If these dominating polarities have not entirely disappeared from our view, they certainly seem to loom far less large in our remapped musical landscape. Indeed, I can think of no other century in music history whose stylistic contours have been so dramatically redrawn as those of the eighteenth century. Of course we would err in the other direction by depicting – to continue my geographical metaphor – only a flattened, homogeneous musical landscape in the eighteenth century, covered with galant-type foliage nurtured in the hothouse of Italian opera buffa. As Webster has convincingly argued, there are still major protruberances jutting out from the first and final thirds of the century that need somehow to be taken into account in our surveys. Still, there is no question that the revised topographies little resemble the one we learned (and still might teach) from our textbooks. Some major tectonic shifts have taken place in eighteenth-century musical studies, even if those shifts have yet to settle down fully into any figuration that enjoys consensus among music historians.