Even deprived of the latest technological appurtenances, the earbudded slacker of today might easily have found her groove in eighteenth-century Hamburg. It was a thriving commercial and cultural centre, the largest city in German-speaking Europe, with a population rising steadily towards one hundred thousand by century's end. Many social practices, institutions and affectations flourished that historians would hasten to call ‘modern’: there were dozens of coffee houses where conversations, games, music, warming beverages and even romance could be had; there were public concerts, many put on for the benefit of the local poor or for the victims of distant disasters (as in the musical initiatives in aid of the victims of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755). A capital of technology and trade, Hamburg was a place of luxury and leisure for those who could afford them. There was plenty of sugar for your coffee: the city was a leader in refining and consuming it. Then there was that new thing called free time that had to be made the most of with walks in town and out of it along the River Elbe. There was poetry to be read and music to be made.

The chief venue for this last activity was the opera house on the Gänsemarkt, the first public music theatre in northern Europe, founded in 1678; in the eighteenth century it lavishly staged works of George Frideric Handel (for a few years in his late teens he'd lived in Hamburg) and his friend Georg Philipp Telemann (the city's Director of Music from 1721 until his death in 1767). With uncharacteristic pithiness, Johann Mattheson, the most prolific and cosmopolitan of writers among Hamburg's many prolific cosmopolitans, laid bare the relationship between cash and culture in 1728: ‘Es trifft auch fast ein, daß, wo die besten Banken, auch die besten Opern sind’ (It's pretty much true that wherever the best banks are, there one will find the best opera. Der Musicalische Patriot (Hamburg: author, 1728), 176). Wealth nourished the arts, both public and private: money made sophisticated music possible for the successful, whether playing alone or listening with fellow burghers.

Like ours, it was an age of entertainment by subscription – for operas, concerts, plays, newspapers, magazines, music journals and printed pieces. Perhaps most modern of all were those services that helped enliven things at home with music, not just for passive enjoyment à la Sonos streaming, but through doing. You had to make your own fun, but in Hamburg you could get the help of the latest app – up-to-date sheet music – from the industry leader.

That leader was Telemann. He vigorously marketed his chamber music and even engraved it himself for purchase and play by patricians, burghers and fellow professionals in Hamburg, across Germany and beyond. From 1715 to the late 1730s Telemann issued forty-six new editions of his works. Even Handel, that pre-Napster pirate eager to snatch a few musical ideas from his friend, was a sometime subscriber from across the North Sea in London. These transactions made the musical merchant rich: Telemann's publishing ventures brought in a few thousand Reichsthaler every year – two or three (or even four) times his music director's salary that, even without his extra business income, equalled the salaries of Hamburg's mayors.

To bring Telemann's sounding pleasantries into the well-furnished home required the proper technology and training: a harpsichord, and perhaps a cello, violin and flute, plus the ability to sing and read music. Musical leisure was not as cheap as it is now. As always – but especially so in a church-going city where Christian values were trumpeted from organ loft and clocktower – affluence bred anxiety. How could one feel good about having so much, or at least not be embarrassed about it?

One form of music therapy for the well-to-do facing this conundrum was the curious genre of the moral cantata. Telemann issued two sets of six in 1725 and 1726 respectively; the first instalment was for harpsichord, with optional cello, and voice (of any register – thus expanding the appeal); the second volume augmented the ensemble with an obbligato part to be played either by violin or by flute. Like the best games, the music Telemann offered for sale was challenging but not so difficult as to be discouraging: it was meant to entertain amateurs and experts alike.

The themes of the moral cantata were similarly unthreatening. Many were the paeans to rural activities like wayfaring, fishing and animal husbandry. Eighteenth-century wellness activities like tobacco smoking and coffee drinking were hymned. Music, too, could be praised in the very doing of it. The joys and pitfalls of love were always available to feed the imagination and the market. Thus urban folk pined for fresh country air; busy merchants longed for a good pipe and the pleasures of indolence; the spurned thought of love. But it's pretty impossible and very stupid to lug a sumptuously veneered two-manual harpsichord over rough roads and across green pastures. These pieces are often about precisely what you don't have at the moment, as in country delights while ensconced in the city.

Such congenial contradictions are reflected most blithely in one of the genre's favourite topics – the renunciation of worldly possessions. But worldly possessions are exactly what Telemann's airing of this sentiment happens to require: a harpsichord for starters; then a flute, maybe a violin; chairs to sit on. Landscape paintings on the walls, a coffee service to enjoy the trendy drink during and after the music: these would be nice, too. And don't forget the cost of the subscription for Telemann's latest.

No one has chronicled Telemann's compositional and capitalistic creativity as rigorously and gracefully as Steven Zohn, whose hefty but ceaselessly engaging book Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann's Instrumental Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) rightly extols the genius and resourcefulness of this unique figure, one so vigorously involved in his own time, but whose musical legacy brightens our own. Telemann was proud not only of his marketplace savvy but also, as a university graduate, of his humanistic learning. Like Telemann, Zohn is a scholar and a practising musician, a baroque flautist of taste and technique. His commentary in the booklet is elegant and illuminating, detailing the intellectual and social context for the genre and clearly describing the musical textures and forms the composer used to animate the moral texts supplied by the Hamburg teenager Johann Joachim Daniel Zimmermann. That this schoolboy could wax poetic on a life of noble poverty and kindred topics shows just how facile such philosophizing could be (perhaps had to be) when served up for bourgeois delight. But the reliance on rhetorical formula doesn't sap the appealing verve of this music and the bright spontaneity of its performance by Zohn and his friends: along with the voice of American soprano Julianne Baird, we are treated to the buoyant bass-line support of Eve Miller on baroque cello, and the imaginative but never intrusive continuo accompaniment from Leon Schelhase on harpsichord. (One might like to know what instruments they play, but this information is not supplied.)

The opening cantata covers ever-elusive contentment (‘Die Zufriedenheit’) in just over ten minutes (the rest of the cantatas come in at just under ten minutes each). The central message expressed matter-of-factly in the recitative calls that man ‘happy, if he lives satisfied at his plough’, and if he ‘covets nothing [he] can well be called rich’. This rather works against the advice of those keyboard tutors of the day that recommended the avoidance of all manual labour. The pseudo-rustic cello drone of the cantata's closing movement suggests that life is more fun without the encumbrance of things – with the exception of flute, cello and harpsichord. This is music that breezes over idyllic fields, the flute line curling and eddying with galant irregularity, not with the dogged straightness of the plough. Zohn's shimmering ornamentation, unpredictable but always natural, captivates on the returns to the opening sections, as if to say there can be contentment in variety. It might even be better than eating the dust of oxen all day.

Telemann redeems such sanctimonious treatment of the rural poor with his light touch, as in the third cantata, ‘Das mäßige Glück’ (Moderate Happiness), where the contrast between the chic finery of the stylish and the dust-grubbing of the rest is evoked with pairs of airy lines, the first in major, the second in minor, the music echoing into silences, captured artfully in this well-produced and well-engineered recording.

Each movement is introduced by an instrumental ritornello whose subtle meanings become clear only once the text is delivered, here by Julianne Baird, who is lithe of voice, clear of diction, clever with her own ornaments, and operatic when the moment calls for it, as in the rage aria of the third cantata ‘Die Liebe’ (Love): ‘You are a great monster, / An arrow, a net, poison, a fire, / And yet, O love, I laugh at you.’ (The excellent translations in the booklet are by Lawrence Rosenwald.) Baird cackles down the scale that leads to the cadences after she has already proven the clarity of her trill and brandished her coloratura with devastating accuracy and expression. The band spurs her fury on.

From turbulence, the sequence of cantatas turns back toward the calm land: another drone sets the scene for ‘Die Landlust’ (Rural Pleasures), and the collection ends with a not uncynical account of ‘Freundschaft’ (Friendship). Its stylish morality might be right at home in our own immoral times. To close the CD, the instrumentalists must make their own meanings in a bravura Telemann sonata – full of shadowy pathos and sparkling panache – from 1734.

Enlightened metropolitans of today would surely condemn the aesthetic exploitation of peasants and proto-proletarians heard on this wonderful disc. Still, such guilty pleasures might make any harpsichord-playing hipster and his hipster friends yearn for that century when the culture industry was in its infancy and the likes of Telemann set the algorithms of taste.