Georg Daniel Speer (1636-1707) was a German composer
and writer of the Baroque period. Speer was born in
Breslau (today Wroclaw, Poland) and died in Göppingen,
Germany. .
Daniel Speer was a prolific composer and author whose
political tracts attracted cnough attention to earn him
a year and a half in prison. His writings on music
provide a gold mine of information about middie Baroque
theory and practice. His article on the trombone
summarizes and expands important earlier writings on
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Georg Daniel Speer (1636-1707) was a German composer
and writer of the Baroque period. Speer was born in
Breslau (today Wroclaw, Poland) and died in Göppingen,
Germany. .
Daniel Speer was a prolific composer and author whose
political tracts attracted cnough attention to earn him
a year and a half in prison. His writings on music
provide a gold mine of information about middie Baroque
theory and practice. His article on the trombone
summarizes and expands important earlier writings on
the instrument, and thus serves as the culmination of
early and middle Baroque writing about it. It also
exerted tremendous influence, directly or indirectly,
on nearly all German writers about the trombone for
more than a hundred years.
Speer first issued his musical treatise in 1687 with
the title Grund-richtiger Kurtz-Leicht- und Nöthiger
jetzt Wol-vermehrter Unterricht der musicalischen Kunst
Oder Vierfaches Musicalisches Kleeblatt (A Fundamental,
Short, Easy, and Necessary Introduction to the Art of
Music). Ten years later, he brought out a second,
greatly expanded edition. The major changes in content
were the increase in the coverage of keyboard
instruments from a brief article of 10 Pages in octavo
to a major section of 150 pages in quarto, and the
inclusion of musical examples to illustrate the correct
way to compose for the various stringed and wind
instruments. Speer also substituted fingering charts
for the verbal descriptions in the first edition.
The middle Baroque was an age of wordy and pompous
treatises. Although Speer himself claimed to despise
the fancy, high-flown style of his contemporaries, he
provided a title for his second edition even more
pretentious than that of the first:
Grund-richtigerkurtz- leicht- und nothiger jetzt
wol-vermehrte Unterricht der Musicalischen kunst oder
Vierfaches musicalisches Kleeblatt (A Fundamental,
Short, Easy, Necessary, Now Greatly Enlarged
Introduction to the Art of Music, or, A Fourfold
Musical Cloverleaf.) Speer must have either loved
extravagant titles or enjoyed poking fun at them. He
subtitled one of his musical collections Neue gebacken
Tafelschnitz, or, Newly Baked Table Scraps. The
cloverleaf imagery in the title of Speer’s second
edition continues throughout the treatise. Each major
section (on rudiments, keyboard instruments, wind and
string instruments, and composition) is called a
cloverleaf.
Although Speer, as a literary man, must have read
widely and known the writings of such illustrious
predecessors as Practorius, his own work is based on
his wide and varied experience as a musician.
Especially early in his career, Speer was restless and
moved frequently. He served as a Stadtpfeifer in
Stuttgart for a while in the 1660s. At the time of
publication of both editions of his Grundrichtiger...
Unterricht, he was a school teacher and cantor at
Géppingen, although he spent five of the intervening
years first in prison and then more or less in
exile.
One reason that the trombone was not described more
frequently in the Baroque era is that the local
musicians’ guilds attempted to keep the playing of
wind and stringed instruments a trade secret.
Apparently, a significant number of professional
musicians feared that if books offered instruction in
playing technique, too many people would begin to play
instruments and guild members would lose their
livelihood. Therefore, Speer found it necessary to open
his third cloverleaf with a defense for his decision to
write and publish. He claimed that having such a book
would save the Stadipfeifer and their students
considerable trouble, pointed out that not everyone who
would read it would have the aptitude to play the
instruments, and that, in any case, no one could learn
to play from a book without the guidance of a
teacher.
Although originally composed for 3 Trombones, I created
this Transcription of the Sonata I in F Major
(Transposed to Bb Major) for 2 Violas & Cello