WEIDEMAN'S MINUET. English, Minuet (3/4 time). D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. Composed by Carl Friedrich Weideman, a German-born composer, flutist and oboist who spent most of his adult life in England, where he arrived around 1724. He was probably playing oboe at the King's Theatre that year. He performed in public through his middle-adulthood, but after 1750 he seems to have devoted himself to teaching and composing, achieving the salaried positions of Master of the King's Musick in 1760, and Composer of Minuets at the Court of St. James. He died in 1782. The Toilette, from William Hogarth's series Marriage a la Mode, c. 1743. Carl Weideman is the flute player on the extreme left. The melody was printed in London publisher John Johnson's The Compleat Tutor for the German Flute (c. 1760), and was included in Scottish musician James Gillespie's Gillespie Manuscript of Perth (1768). "Weideman's Minuet" was also entered in the mid-19th century music manuscript of William Winter[1], a shoemaker and violin player who lived in West Bagborough in Somerset, southwest England. In America, the minuet can be found the music copybooks of flute player Micah Hawkins (New York, 1794), Daniel Henry Huntington (Onondaga, N.Y., 1817), and flute player H. Canfield (Hartford, 1823).
Additional notes
Printed sources : - Manson (Hamilton's Universal Tune Book, vol. 1), 1853; p. 105. Geoff Woolfe (William Winter’s Quantocks Tune Book), 2007; No. 187, p. 71 (as "Weideman's Minuet", ms. originally dated 1850).
