Johann Mattheson's 'oratory in sound': the intelligibility of instrumental music

Abstract

Can instrumental music truly function as a wordless, but still perfectly persuasive, oration? Johann Mattheson certainly though so, and in his famous treatise on the art of composition, Der vollkommene Capellmeister, he returns to this idea again and again. The purpose of all music, according to Mattheson, is firstly to honour God, and secondly to arouse in the listener a love for virtue and a disgust for vice. Music, he says, is 'above all a teacher of propriety'. These moral attitudes were to be stirred up in the listener by a skilful presentation of the affections, which may be defined as rationalised emotional states or passions. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and its goal is to make an audience think or feel a certain way. It therefore shares the same goal as music, in Mattheson's world-view, and so it is natural that he would use it as a source of ideas and techniques for his theory of musical persuasion. Mattheson conceived instrumental music to be very closely analogous to an oration. According to classical rhetorical theory, as described in the treatises of Cicero and Quintilian, the method of composing a speech comprised five main steps. The first step, deciding on a topic and gathering information, was called the inventio. Then the material was arranged logically according to a six-part plan, from the introduction, to different kinds of argument, to the conclusion. This arrangement was called the dispositio. Next, the elocutio step involved fleshing out the ideas, observing the virtues of correctness, clarity, and decorum, and adding emphasis by using figures of speech. Then came memorisation, and finally the speech was performed, with appropriate gestures and inflections. Each step in this process has its own set of principles and procedures, all with the aim of maximising the persuasive power of the final speech. Mattheson was the first to introduce this process in its entirety to musical composition. Mattheson's application of rhetoric, with its long history and abundant theoretical tradition, to instrumental music was not unproblematic, and the ambiguities which exist in Mattheson's work derive from the difficulty of reconciling the rhetorical and musical arts. The underlying and interrelated tensions in his philosophy of music - conflicts between the natural and the artificial, melody and harmony, and vocal and instrumental music - show through constantly in his writings, at every level of the compositional process. These tensions in Mattheson's theories may be summed up by the fact that he places a high value on naturalness and spontaneity in music, but offers a long list of techniques and rules which must he followed in order to achieve a 'natural', simple, and affective melody (unless, of course, one happens to be a genius). These rules, and the rhetorical process itself, are a means to consistency of affective representation, thus making the music not only more powerfully persuasive, but intelligible as well; for Mattheson believed that if instrumental music is modelled on impassioned, persuasive speech, the listener should be able to understand it, and be moved by it, as effectively if it really were speech.