Johann Christoph Denner (13 August 1655 – 26 April 1707)Martin Kirnbauer. "Denner", ''

Grove Music Online ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theo ...

'', ed. L. Macy (accessed 13 October 2006)
grovemusic.com
(subscription access). was a German

woodwind instrument Woodwind instruments are a family of musical instruments within the greater category of wind instruments. Common examples include flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, and saxophone. There are two main types of woodwind instruments: flutes and Reed ...

maker of the

Baroque 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 ...

era, to whom the invention of the

clarinet The clarinet is a musical instrument in the woodwind family. The instrument has a nearly cylindrical bore and a flared bell, and uses a single reed to produce sound. Clarinets comprise a family of instruments of differing sizes and pitches ...

is attributed. Denner was born in

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 ...

to a family of horn-tuners. With his father, Heinrich Denner, a maker of game

whistle A whistle is an instrument which produces sound from a stream of gas, most commonly air. It may be mouth-operated, or powered by air pressure, steam, or other means. Whistles vary in size from a small slide whistle or nose flute type to a larg ...

s and

hunting horn A horn is any of a family of musical instruments made of a tube, usually made of metal and often curved in various ways, with one narrow end into which the musician blows, and a wide end from which sound emerges. In horns, unlike some other br ...

s, he moved to

Nuremberg Nuremberg ( ; german: link=no, Nürnberg ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the second-largest city of the German state of Bavaria after its capital Munich, and its 518,370 (2019) inhabitants make it the 14th-largest ...

in 1666. J. C. Denner went into business as an instrument maker in 1678 and was granted rights for the “manufacture of French musical instruments consisting chiefly of oboes and recorders landadois�� in 1697. Two of his sons,

Jacob Jacob (; ; ar, يَعْقُوب, Yaʿqūb; gr, Ἰακώβ, Iakṓb), later given the name Israel, is regarded as a patriarch of the Israelites and is an important figure in Abrahamic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. J ...

and Johann David, also became instrument builders. At least sixty-eight instruments attributed to J. C. Denner have survived to the present day, although the surviving instruments with his name are believed to have come from his sons' workshops. Denner died in 1707 and was buried in Nuremberg. In 1730,

Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr (27 September 1677 – 1 December 1750) was a German mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer. (His surname is also spelled Doppelmayer and Doppelmair.) Professional life and publications He was born in Nuremberg, t ...

wrote of Denner: : ''At the beginning of the current century, he invented a new kind of pipe-work, the so-called clarinet... and at length presented an improved chalumeau.'' In On the basis of this passage, Denner has been credited by many with the improvement of the

chalumeau The chalumeau (; ; plural chalumeaux) is a single-reed woodwind instrument of the late baroque and early classical eras. The chalumeau is a folk instrument that is the predecessor to the modern-day clarinet. It has a cylindrical bore with e ...

and the invention of the clarinet. Despite the words "At the beginning of the current century" he is often said to have developed the clarinet in 1690; there is no evidence for this. In fact, J. C. Denner may have built no clarinets at all. Only one extant clarinet, owned by the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

has been attributed to him, and this attribution has been challenged. Another instrument possibly made by Denner was destroyed in

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. The earliest known reference to the clarinet is an

invoice An invoice, bill or tab is a commerce, commercial document issued by a sales, seller to a buyer relating to a sale transaction and indicating the product (business), products, quantities, and agreed-upon prices for products or Service (economic ...

from

Jacob Denner Jacob Denner (1681 – 1735) was a woodwind instrument maker of Nuremberg. He was the son of Johann Christoph Denner, improver of the chalumeau The chalumeau (; ; plural chalumeaux) is a single-reed woodwind instrument of the late baroque ...

dated 1710, three years after J. C. Denner's death.

References

Johann Christoph Denner

1655 births 1707 deaths Recorder makers German musical instrument makers {{Germany-musician-stub