David Kellner (1670 – 6 April 1748) was a German composer of the

Baroque period The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

and a contemporary of

Bach Johann Sebastian Bach (28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the '' Brandenburg Concertos''; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard w ...

. Kellner was born in

Liebertwolkwitz Liebertwolkwitz is an outlying settlement and ''Ortsteil'' of Leipzig on the city's south side. It contains the , the highest elevation in the Leipzig area. It was established in or before 1040. Before the local government boundary reform in 199 ...

, near

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

. Apart from compositions for the

lute A lute ( or ) is any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back enclosing a hollow cavity, usually with a sound hole or opening in the body. It may be either fretted or unfretted. More specifically, the term "lute" can ref ...

, which are today highly regarded, he wrote on the

theory of music Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. ''The Oxford Companion to Music'' describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory". The first is the "Elements of music, rudiments", that are needed to understand ...

and particularly on writing for

equal temperament An equal temperament is a musical temperament or tuning system, which approximates just intervals by dividing an octave (or other interval) into equal steps. This means the ratio of the frequencies of any adjacent pair of notes is the same, wh ...

. His diagram of the

circle of fifths In music theory, the circle of fifths is a way of organizing the 12 chromatic pitches as a sequence of perfect fifths. (This is strictly true in the standard 12-tone equal temperament system — using a different system requires one interval ...

is the earliest extant example of the modern layout with major keys and minor keys in two concentric circles, the major immediately outside its

relative minor In music, relative keys are the major and minor scales that have the same key signatures (enharmonically equivalent), meaning that they share all the same notes but are arranged in a different order of whole steps and half steps. A pair of major an ...

External links

David Kellner - A biographical survey
* 1670 births 1748 deaths 18th-century classical composers 18th-century German composers 18th-century German male musicians Composers for lute German Baroque composers German classical composers German lutenists German male classical composers German music theorists {{Germany-composer-stub