An Englishman's first visit to  New York may well be a bewildering experience; but to make such a visit while attending his first American Musicological Society Conference could cause him to lose all sense of balance and proportion. He can only cling, rather reluctantly, to the truism that size does not automatically lead to excellence or to interest, and hope not to have missed the point.

By English standards the meeting was a gigantic affair, staged on the first and nineteenth floors of a central New York hotel, whose lifts were small and erratic. Nonetheless the several lectures and lecture-recitals held concurrently were never attended by less than four hundred delegates, and the conference as a whole numbered well over two thousand. There was a healthy diversity of material under discussion: the Baroque, especially Handel, was very much in evidence; further inconclusive sessions were devoted to unravelling the structure of leading 20th-century compositions; early music, really early music, was performed, if not discussed, at great length; and a certain shyness could at last be detected over the Beethoven Sketchbooks. The impact of all this was flabby and enervating. The overall standard of performance was unbelievably low and the lectures