Town piper

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Fra Olaus Magnus : town piper around 1555

The town musicians (ital. Piffaro ) was a particularly between the 14th and 18th century cities employee, later town musician called musicians . Stadtpfeifer formed guilds (in southern Germany mostly called "Pfeiferbrüder", in Alemannic "Pifferbrüder"). In the 19th century this office was expanded to include city chapels.

history

The tasks of the town pipers lay in the musical organization of festivities in the town. In some cities Piffari were also a watchman responsible for signaling tasks. The town pipers were organized according to guilds. A master took on journeymen and apprentices who had to learn as many common instruments as possible from him.

The town pipers played on tines , natural trumpets , trombones , string instruments , noise pipes , dulcians , Pomeranians , crooked horns , flutes and percussion . Two tines and three trombones ("Hora decima", Forty Leipzig Tower Sonatas by Johann Christoph Pezel ) and one zinc and three trombones ("Twenty-four Quatricinien" by Gottfried Reiche ) can be found in the music literature .

Town pipers played at engagements, weddings, banquets and other festive events such as B. the entry of the sovereign into his city. In addition, they blew the time signal from the tower of the city to show the time to the citizens, who usually did not have a clock. They were also used in part for church music . The rule was: normal days in the church year were played with trumpets and prongs, festive days with trumpets and timpani. (To this day, “with timpani and trumpets” is an idiom for something great). During the service, the town pipers duplicated the choir's voices, the so-called colla-parte accompaniment .

In Erfurt , the Bach family occupied the city ​​pfeifer office for generations and dominated the city's musical life to such an extent that in the 1790s all city pfeifers were called "Bache", although no bearer of this name lived there anymore. Smaller towns such as Eisenach (with around 6000 inhabitants) also had a town whistle. Contemporary witnesses describe the entry of the victorious troops into Vienna after the Turkish wars as particularly impressive : alternating choir and town piper from the rooftops, in between the army music and the thunder of cannons.

The tradition of the town pipers survived, especially in central Germany, into the 20th century. In many places, city bands first emerged from it, later also city orchestras.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Stadtpfeifer  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Max Döllner : History of the development of the city of Neustadt an der Aisch until 1933. Ph. CW Schmidt, Neustadt ad Aisch 1950, p. 663.
  2. ^ Andreas Kruse: The border crossings of Johann Sebastian Bach . 2nd edition, Springer, Berlin Heidelberg 2014, p. 35, ISBN 978-3-642-54627-3