(Ger.: ‘shouting pipe’).
A loud wind-cap shawm (see Wind-cap instruments) of the 16th and 17th centuries, with expanding conical bore, but without a markedly flared bell, and having seven finger-holes and a thumb-hole. Ten such instruments survive in Berlin (Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung; see illustration) and Prague (Národní Muzeum). The Berlin instruments came from St Wenzel, Naumburg, where they were listed in inventories dating from 1658, c1720 and 1728 as ‘Schreiarien’ (also ‘Schrey-Arien’, ‘Schreyarien’); the Prague instruments came from the castle at Rožmberk (Rosenberg) in Bohemia, in whose inventories of 1599 and 1610 they appear as ‘Srayffaiff’. These instruments represent four sizes pitched a 4th or 5th apart, each with a range of a 9th; the highest sounds f' as its lowest note. On the largest two sizes the lowest sound hole is fitted with a key, and all sizes have two vent-holes on opposite sides (left and right) of the bell. Two instruments of uncertain date and origin survive in the Musikinstrumenten-Museum, University of Leipzig; they are equivalent in size to the soprano and alto instruments of the other group and are similar except that they have no thumb-holes.
The earliest occurrence of the name, in 1523, shows that Schreyerpfeifen were made in Nuremberg, probably by Sigmund Schnitzer the elder; and Arsazius Schnitzer of Munich, who died in 1557, is also recorded as a maker. A number of German town and court inventories list Schreyerpfeifen, usually in sets of three or four sizes. They went out of general use during the later 17th century though they are still listed in the Naumburg inventories in the 1720s, and Fuhrmann mentioned them, together with contemporary instruments, in 1706. ‘Schryari’ suggests an Italian form of the German Schreyerpfeifen, but the name is not documented outside Germany, though wind-cap shawms are (e.g. the French cléron pastoral, mentioned by Trichet). Considerable confusion has been caused by Praetorius’s use of the plural forms ‘Schryari’ and ‘Schreyerpfeifen’ for a group of loud wind-cap instruments of quite different type (see Schryari).
PraetoriusSM, ii
PraetoriusTI
M. Fuhrmann: Musicalischer-Trichter (Frankfurt an der Spree, 1706)
D. Krickeberg: ‘Die Alte Musikinstrumentensammlung der Naumburger St. Wenzelskirche im Spiegel ihrer Verzeichnisse’, Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (1977), 7–30
B.R. Boydell: The Crumhorn and Other Renaissance Windcap Instruments (Buren, 1982)
BARRA R. BOYDELL