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 II in C Major (Transposed to F Major) for 2 Violas & Cello