Johann Mattheson – Hamburg composer, singer, secretary to Sir John Wich, the English ambassador to Hamburg, and, first and foremost, writer on music – is considered to be one of the most significant, perhaps the most significant music theorist of the eighteenth century. Not least because of their quantity (almost sixty monographs and various other publications), his writings have served as vital sources for the understanding of baroque music in Protestant north Germany. Although scholars have sporadically aimed at extending the image of Mattheson, for instance by pointing to his role as a diplomat's secretary (see New Mattheson Studies, ed. George J. Buelow and Hans Joachim Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)) or as the agent of sensualism in Germany (see Laurenz Lütteken, ‘Matthesons Orchesterschriften und der englische Sensualismus’, Die Musikforschung 60/3 (2007), 203–213), his intellectual activities outside the field of music have been thus far neglected. (Further evidence of these activities can be found in the long list ‘Texte ohne musikalischen Bezug’ (Texts without Musical Reference) that Klaus Pietschmann assembled for the ‘Mattheson’ entry in the new Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Personenteil, column 1338).)

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is financing a three-year project that began in 2007, ‘Johann Mattheson als Vermittler und Initiator: Wissenstransfer und die Etablierung neuer Diskurse in der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’ (Johann Mattheson as Mediator and Initiator: The Transfer of Knowledge and the Establishing of New Discourses in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century), directed by Wolfgang Hirschmann (Institut für Musikwissenschaft, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) and Bernhard Jahn (Institut für Germanistik, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg). As part of this, Mattheson's literary Nachlass, held in the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky, has been digitally indexed by Dominik Stoltz (student research assistant to the project). Then, in March 2009, Hirschmann and Jahn hosted a conference in tandem with Jürgen Neubacher (director of the music department of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg). The conference, dedicated to the ‘totality of Mattheson's oeuvre’ and the ‘manifold orders and practices of knowledge in which he participated and that became an essential basis of his new music-theoretical approach’, invited presenters to reconsider the composer and writer on music in light of his achievements as a publicist, translator, diplomat and moralist. Thus the concept behind the conference drew on current research trends that, as Jahn pointed out in his introductory remarks, emphasize the relevance of the transfer of knowledge and the creative integration – rather than the exclusion – of foreign elements into a cultural region's identity. In this light, Hirschmann stated, Mattheson's style of eclectic thinking, which he had adopted from early Enlightenment thinkers such as Johann Christoph Sturm and Christian Thomasius – his openness towards different styles of music (French and Italian), critical examination of traditions and authorities, and synthesis of separate theories – can be considered to have been an effective catalyst for such transfer and transformation. Because of this transdisciplinary orientation the conference included a number of presenters from outside the discipline of musicology: speakers also came from the fields of history, philosophy, literary theory and theology.

After the opening ceremonial act, during which Hans-Joachim Marx (Professor Emeritus of the Universität Hamburg) reminded us of the complex relationship between Mattheson and Handel, especially the attitude of Mattheson towards Handel, the first session revolved around the media, cultural transfer within Europe and the educational background of the Hamburg public. The paper by Holger Böning (Universität Bremen) on Mattheson's activities as Hamburg publicist put the significance of British monthlies in early eighteenth-century Germany into perspective; he drew attention to the similarly minded German periodicals that were already being published from the end of the seventeenth century. Both Martin Krieger (Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald) and Dirk Hempel (Universität Hamburg) investigated the periodicals Der Patriot and Der Vernünfftler, the latter edited by Mattheson in 1713–1714 and in 1721. Whereas the historian Krieger focused on the periodicals' relationship to the discourse on patriotism, the German literary theorist Hempel investigated the differences between various articles from the British moral weeklies The Tatler and The Spectator and Mattheson's German translations of them. He considered these translations as historical sources on Hamburg audiences of the time and the state of their knowledge. Mattheson's explanations of terms such as ‘society’ and ‘discussion’, for instance, indicate that Enlightened social forms and practices were developing but were by no means self-evident at this time. Eva Helenius (Stockholm) ended the Thursday morning session by examining Mattheson's connections with Sweden.

From the subsequent session onwards, two – partly contrary – positions became apparent on how to relate Mattheson to issues of progression and tradition. The musicologists Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen (Universität Zürich) and Rainer Bayreuther (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald) emphasized Mattheson's role as a progressive. Whereas Hinrichsen drew attention to singular passages in Mattheson's texts that anticipated later musico-aesthetic ideas concerning veracity, deception and mimesis, Bayreuther focused on a music-historical phenomenon that he dubbed the dynamization of musical knowledge (“Dynamisierung des musikalischen Wissens”). In his view, in the eighteenth century the notion of the dynamic character of musical rules replaced the former idea that fixed physical and arithmetical laws were the basis of composition. Mattheson's new, more flexible approach towards rules, most likely developed in light of the significant stylistic changes in music around 1700 (from Johann Wolfgang Franck und Johann Theile to Keiser and Mattheson himself), manifested itself in the use of opaque terms such as ‘taste’ (as a criterion for the assessment of art), ‘galant’ and ‘natural’ (as markers of aesthetic quality). These replaced positive rules, highlighting instead the need for social and cultural negotiation. Ivana Rentsch (Universität Zürich) shared Bayreuther's perspective as she shed light on the relationship between sensualism and galanterie. She argued that sensualist ideals, those involving the ‘absolutization of the senses’, enabled the social concept of galanterie to be adapted to music-aesthetical discourse. Operating as a regulative concept, galant taste replaced the earlier scientific approach to music that Mattheson had often criticized in his writings. Complementing the aesthetic focus of these papers, Karsten Mackensen (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) analysed the eclectic method of Mattheson's later writings, and Birger Petersen (Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock) investigated to what degree Mattheson's teachings on melody, most systematically presented in Der vollkommene Capellmeister, can be considered as a kind of paradigm shift that carried as much weight as Rameau's teachings on harmony.

In contrast to these papers, various scholars shed light on Mattheson's conservative approaches to foreign ideas, involving less the support for than the repression of innovation. Analysing Mattheson's translations of Defoe's Moll Flanders (1723) and Richardson's Pamela (1742–1743), Dirk Rose (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) showed that Mattheson's significant modifications concealed or even excluded those modern features, such as the display of sentimental morals, for which the novels are hailed today. Moreover, Rose suggested that the key criterion for the choice of novels to translate was the extent to which they could satisfy the sensational tastes of contemporary audiences. The philosopher Alexander Aichele (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) investigated Mattheson's reception of John Locke. He showed that Mattheson heavily distorted Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, and in a fairly systematic manner. Repressing one of the key aspects of Locke's empiricism – the idea that reflection, in addition to perception, is an independent source of ideas – Mattheson launched not so much empirical thought as a radical sensualism. This allowed him to propound the view that aesthetic judgments should be based exclusively on levels of audience appreciation – meaning that these judgments would be subject to the whims of fashion. Internal, rationally verifiable criteria for judging the quality of music played no role in Mattheson's theory. My own paper (Beate Kutschke, Berlin) reached similar conclusions about the then-popular formula ‘Natur- und Sittenlehre’ (referring to hard scientific exploration and moral instruction) that Mattheson employed in the third chapter of Der vollkommener Capellmeister. He applied the formula merely superficially by combining a survey of modern acoustics (‘Naturlehre’) with the traditional doctrine of music's influence on human health and morals (‘Sittenlehre’), without paying any attention to the highly modernist, Enlightened ideas to which the formula implicitly referred: that moral imperatives and natural justice possessed a similarly obligatory character to the laws of nature and thus could not fail to be implemented in Enlightened society.

In light of these findings, Mattheson's writings have to be considered as ‘strategically’ oriented, as Hinrichsen put it: they are less concerned with truth and precision and more with advocacy, first and foremost of Mattheson's musical concerns. This became particularly clear in connection with Mattheson's theologically oriented writings. As religious scholar Joyce Irwin (Syracuse, New York) suggested, they tried to show that Luther's translation had led to an over-emphasis on the sermon in evangelical worship. Against this emphasis on verbal language, Mattheson's literalistic reading of the Bible convinced him not only that all praise of God on earth has a musical component but also that music is an audible reality and corporeal activity of angels and resurrected bodies in heaven. Along the same lines, the theologian Erik Dremel (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) pointed out that Mattheson's Behauptung der himmlischen Musik (Claim about Heavenly Music (1747)) was guided less by a theological impetus than by the desire to strengthen the socio-cultural significance of music – on earth and in heaven.

Melanie Wald (Universität Zürich) and Vera Viehöver (Université de Liège) shed light on further aspects of Mattheson's ‘strategic’ writing. Wald proposed that Mattheson's translation of and commentary on Mainwaring's Handel biography was in fact more a reflection on his own end than on his famous colleague's life. Viehöver argued that the Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (1740) was not intended as an (auto-)biographical work in the classical sense, but aimed first and foremost at what we would call networking. (The honour that naturally derived from having been included in the Ehrenpforte implicitly committed that person to demonstrate loyalty toward Mattheson.) Despite his focus on social inclusion, Mattheson appears to have been difficult socially. Jürgen Neubacher's paper showed this with reference to Mattheson's Nachlass. It provides evidence of a quarrel between Mattheson and the singers of Hamburg Cathedral, obviously caused by his notoriously pointed pen; this finally led to his failure as cantor in 1728.

The multi-faceted image of Mattheson was completed by the papers of Hansjörg Drauschke (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg), Rudolf Rasch (Universiteit Utrecht) and Steffen Voss (Sächsischen Landesbibliothek - Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden), which focused on individual genres within Mattheson's compositional output. Drauschke investigated the operatic oeuvre in light of Mattheson's adaptation of operas by other composers. These can be read as documents of the transfer of international music-dramatic models. Shedding light on the ‘Sonates à deux et trois flûtes sans basse’, Rasch emphasized the progressive role that Mattheson's duos and trios without basso continuo played in the development of music for non-professionals. Voss pointed to elements of both the theatrical style, on the one hand, and the church style, on the other, in Mattheson's oratorios.

Further aspects of Mattheson's oeuvre and activities were examined by Birgit Kiupel (Hamburg), Dominik Stoltz (Universität Hamburg) and Stefanie Arend (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg). Kiupel showed how the repertory of Hamburg's Gänsemarkt Oper could be read for its take on concepts of gender, especially in the light of galant discourse on this subject. Stoltz explored the membership and activities of the poets' circle ‘Orden des guten Geschmacks’ (Order of Good Taste), founded by Mattheson in 1732 and in operation until 1734. Basing his argument on documents mostly held at the Mattheson archives at the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky, he outlined the relationship between Mattheson and the Hamburg poet Friedrich von Hagedorn, who was also a member of the Order. In addition, Stoltz also pointed to the Order's distinct orientation towards foreign countries, particularly encouraged by its members' professional occupation in the diplomatic services. The after-effects of the Order manifested themselves in Mattheson's last musical publication, Odeon morale of 1751. Arend analysed the anonymous text Sonderbare Licht- und Wetter-Philosophie gewisser Einwohner auf einer neu-entdeckten Insul in [sic] südländischen Meer (Strange Philosophy on Light and Weather of Certain Inhabitants on a Newly Discovered Island in the South Seas (1741)), which can be found attributed to Mattheson in the Harold Jantz Collection of German Baroque Literature held at Duke University. This led to a discussion of questions of authorship and rhetoric.

The programme was complemented by a workshop and an exhibition of contemporaneous writings, letters, drafts and musical instruments that drew on Mattheson's Nachlass in the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg. Both workshop and exhibition had been mainly conceived and organized by Stoltz. An opening concert included various arias from Mattheson's operas Cleopatra and Boris Goudenow and Handel's/Mattheson's opera Zenobia, performed by Bettina Pahn (soprano) and Rudolf Kelber (harpsichord).

It is well known that the cultural-historical turn that has transformed the humanities in Germany in recent times has not yet had much impact on German musicology. Except for a few scholars who, in the past ten to fifteen years, have promoted such a perspective, traditional scholarship of the historical, philological and editorial sort continues to prevail. The commitment to newer methods that one finds nowadays in online descriptions of musicological research fields is more a strategic relabelling than an indication of a true turn; it pays tribute to the – rather ineffective – efforts of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to support interdisciplinary and culturally oriented scholarship in musicology.

In this light, the organizers' interdisciplinary and cultural-historical brief for the Mattheson conference cannot be underestimated. Ironically enough, despite that long list of ‘Texte ohne musikalischen Bezug’ in the new MGG, Mattheson turned out to be a rather difficult subject – not only because his adaptation of innovative thought was shown to have been half-hearted, but also because many of the writings on this list are unavailable or represent doubtful attributions. However, it was the conference's critical insight into Mattheson's failure adequately to acknowledge the intellectual innovations of his time that proved most valuable. The papers presented on other than music-related topics also called his writings on music into question. They encourage facing what, in my view, has been suppressed all too long: the fact that the impressive quantity of Mattheson's writings is by no means matched in quality. Emphasizing, instead of downplaying, the lack of systematic and consistent thought that characterizes much of his writing, and thus abandoning the usual admiring attitude, however, also means a departure from established approaches to research. To this point, the vagueness and equivocality that arise from Mattheson's spontaneous mode of writing have allowed single, fragmentary thoughts to be connected in order to demonstrate his progressive attitude.

The final discussion considered prospects for future research: first, the reception of Mattheson's music-theoretical writings (who appropriated and diffused Mattheson's writings, and when and how? to what extent does Mattheson's canonical role in music and cultural history result from much later judgments?), secondly, Mattheson's role and status within the Hamburg intellectual community of his time (was Mattheson as integral a part of this as he claimed in his publications?) and, finally, the need for a deeper investigation of the transfer and reshaping of socio-cultural concepts such as the galant from a French absolutist to a German bourgeois Protestant context and how that affected the discourse on and creation of music.The conference papers will be published in a volume of proceedings.