Johann Mattheson's Writings on Music and the Ethical Shift Around 1700

While the cultural determinants of the courtier manifested itself in music, musicologists neglected the idea that the tractates of the courtier had far more serious an impetus than defining manners of conversation and other leisure time activities such as art, dance, and music. Advising the individual how to behave and act appropriately in various social situations, they defined a special ethics of behavior, an ethics centering around political prudence, "simulatio" and "dissimulatio." In the decades around 1700, the feudal ethics of behavior that ruled all over Europe was slowly replaced by modern bourgeois-oriented ethics, which can be categorized as ethics of virtue. This moral transformative process and its impact on music and musical thought manifests itself most clearly in Johann Mattheson's writings on music, especially his use of the term "galant," an originally clearly feudal term. Mattheson adopts a re-ethicized notion of the term as propelled by Thomasius, Barth, and the moral weeklies. In this framework, Mattheson avails himself of the virtuous-ethical idea of inner-outer coherence and applies it to music.