Buxtehude Quotes

Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.

passacaglia by the old master Buxtehude.

And he had promised that next time he would play a truly exquisite piece of old organ music, a passacaglia by Buxtehude.

Much of the music of the north European Baroque is familiar to organists, but it is often played and registered in a static and lackluster manner. This music is exuberant; the big pieces were meant to be exciting and even startling, and the small pieces offer endless opportunities for color. Perhaps part of our problem lies in the familiar brittle-sounding “neo-Baroque” instruments of the 1950s and 1960s that we tend to associate with this music, with their thin, top-heavy sound and unyielding wind supply. While it is true that the organs of northern Europe ostensibly provided the inspiration for this style, it is more of the letter than the spirit. They look all right on paper, but lack the substance to deliver musically. The instruments for which Buxtehude, Bruhns and Böhm wrote are red-blooded, warm, and colorful, with seeming faults–such as unequal temperament and wind systems of uncertain equilibrium–that turn to virtues when the right music is played on them.

Franklin Mallory, recognized the strains of Johann Sebastian Bach’s D minor toccata and fugue. Mallory found this famous work untidy and illogical and annoyingly reminiscent of Buxtehude—but then, organ music in general made him impatient. Like the rhetoric of his political enemies, it was overwrought.

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