Context is everything in any iconographical study. In the case of the clarinet, images can provide essential clues about the instrument's origin, development, and amazingly diverse role in the history of musical life. Initially an anomaly, Johann Christoph Denner's prototypes from circa 1700 seem practically to have appeared out of thin air, notwithstanding slight and ambiguous connections with various folk instruments, organ pipes, and bagpipe drones, as well as the more established woodwinds. Early images of clarinetists start to bring the instrument into focus in a unique and informative way, providing details and context for this nascent stage. Prior to Denner's invention, an engraving by the Dutch artist Gerrit Clausz Bleker (1592–1656) shows a cowherd blowing on some sort of pipe, very possibly a single-reed instrument (fig. 1.1). Such simple, idioglot instruments had already made their way into Mersenne's highly regarded Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636), albeit somewhat dismissively referred to as “a shepherd's pipe.” In this description, these Dutch and French depictions find common ground.

By the early 1700s, we are on firmer footing, and perhaps no image better illustrates this than Johann Christoph Weigel's iconic “Clarinetist” from his Musikalisches Theatrum (fig. 1.2). The elegantly attired player stands in an impressive room, and the caption suggests a noble, if not military, context.

Similarly, Martin Engelbrecht's patrician (amateur?) musician, posed next to a table replete with woodwind instruments, entitled “Flöten, Hautbois, Flachinett, Fagot und Clarinett, &c.” (Augsburg, ca. 1725), shows the clarinet as an equal among its woodwind peers, again in a refined setting. And although they are quite pretty, the more utilitarian fingering charts from J. F. B. C. Majer (Museum Musicum, Schwäbisch Hall, 1732; fig. 1.3) and J. P. Eisel (Musicus Autodidaktos, Erfurt, 1738) do not go much beyond the merely informative. The relative importance of their being included in these important volumes at all should not be underestimated; a presence among the more ubiquitous and well-established woodwinds envisages a bright future for this new instrument.