Since the appearance in 1996 of Artigrama’s issue nº 12, there has been a considerable expansion of historical studies of musicians’ mobility during the 18th century. They have established close links between music history and the micro-history of migratory and diasporic phenomena, the history of networks and the history of cultural mediation. These analytical and documentary updates have been fuelled by a growing dialogue between the social history of performance and other areas of research, especially concerning connected and global history, women’s and gender history and the history of science and technology. In this historiographic framework, the operating concepts of ‘privileged migrants’, ‘agency’ and ‘innovation’ enrich our understanding of the timescales and geographical horizons appropriate to the different performers’ careers, the gender norms and transgressions at work in long-distance and long-term mobility plans, and also the cultural and technical transfers driving the music market and the circulation of musical instruments, that increasingly integrate colonial and non-European spaces.