German crumhorn makers active from the late 15th or early 16th century to the mid-16th century in Memmingen. Their instruments are marked with a single, double or triple reverse ‘f’ (see illustration); this symbol corresponds to an ‘I’ or ‘J’ in contemporary script. There appear to have been two or three crumhorn makers of this name: Jörg (i) (d ?before 1530), Jörg (ii) (b c1485–90; d ?1549) and Jörg (iii) (fl ?1557–65). References occur to a ‘Jörg Weyer’ in Memmingen records of 1513, 1518 and the 1520s, sometimes describing him as a town musician; these could concern Jörg (i) or Jörg (ii) or both of them. The listing of voters for the referendum in 1530 on the proposals of the Augsburg Reichstag includes only one Jörg Weyer (he was one of the small minority of voters who rejected the Reformation proposals); it seems therefore that Jörg (i) had died before 1530. References to the name after that date must be to Jörg (ii), as are probably those to an unnamed Memmingen crumhorn maker. In 1549 the records of Nuremberg, which had bought crumhorns from Memmingen in 1539, mention the death of ‘the crumhorn maker’, believed to be Jörg (ii). However, a great bass crumhorn marked with the double reverse ‘f’ (Prague) survives from the Rožmberk (Rosenberg) court band, which was established in 1552; this suggests that crumhorns were still being made with the Weir mark after the death of Jörg (ii). The maker may have been the ‘Jörg Weyer’ mentioned in the Memmingen records in 1557 and 1565, probably a son of Jörg (ii). No other crumhorn makers are known to have been active in Memmingen or Nuremberg.
The assertion that there was more than one maker with the same name rests largely on the evidence provided by the makers’ marks on surviving Wier instruments. Two crumhorns of type III (see Crumhorn, §2), with decorated key covers dated 1522 and 1524 (now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and the Museo di Strumenti Musicali, Rome), carry the name ‘Ioerg Wier’ and a double reverse ‘f’ mark (the instrument in Rome is marked with a triple reverse ‘f’, the only known occurrence of this form). The double mark is found only on instruments of type III. Other crumhorns, mainly of type II, bear a single version of the mark. The fact that the Schnitzer family of wind-instrument makers, active at the same period in Nuremberg and Munich, used a similar system of single and double marks, together with the presence of the single mark on a type II crumhorn and its absence from larger sizes of crumhorns with keys, suggests that the single mark belonged to an earlier maker than the double one; it seems reasonable to infer, therefore, that the different versions of the reverse ‘f’ mark represented several generations of the Wier family.
29 Wier crumhorns are known (more than half of all surviving crumhorns), most of which were made by Jörg (ii); all sizes, from soprano (‘Exilent’) to great bass are represented. The instrument dated 1522, an extended tenor, is the earliest dated crumhorn with extension keys, and the Wiers may have been responsible for developing the classic type III crumhorn. Wier crumhorns were greatly sought after; the courts at Dresden, Ambras (near Innsbruck), Rožmberk and Trent (the prince-bishop’s court) are all known to have owned sets, as did the city of Nuremberg and probably Augsburg. A set in the old cathedral in Salamanca is thought to have been there since the 16th century.
Vander StraetenMPB, vii
Young HI
B.R. Boydell: ‘Ioerg Wier: an Early Sixteenth-Century Crumhorn Maker’, EMc, vii (1979), 511–18
B.R. Boydell: The Crumhorn and other Renaissance Windcap Instruments (Buren, 1982), chap.5
K.T. Meyer: The Crumhorn: its History, Design, Repertory, and Technique (Ann Arbor, 1983), 52–71
L. Cervelli: Antichi strumenti in un moderno museo: Museo nazionale degli strumenti musicali, Roma (Rome, 2/1986, ed. R. Meucci)
J. Hanchet and R.Schlenker: ‘Bedeutender Fund in Salamanca, Spanien: Entdeckung und Untersuchung der Pommern und Krummhörner in der mittelalterlichen Kathedrale in November 1983’, Tibia, xi (1986), 125–30
BARRA R. BOYDELL