Modes and tones in Buxtehude's organ works

Abstract

IT is from Johann Mattheson that we learn of Buxtehude’s seven keyboard suites based on the properties of the planets. After citing them as a fine example of Buxtehude’s keyboard music he regrets the fact that none of Buxtehude’s keyboard music was available to him in print.1 We in turn regret the loss of these suites in any form, but some compensation emerged in the 1980s, when Piet Kee argued that the Passacaglia, BuxWV161, was based on the Moon.2 Kee dwelt principally on numerological considerations, citing the mathematical calculations concerning the phases of the Moon offered by the Königsberg music theorist Conrad Matthaei in his Bericht von den Modis Musicis, published in 1652, when Buxtehude was in his teens. Further support for Kee’s suggestion can also be found in the main portion of Matthaei’s treatise, where his discussion of the modes includes the manner in which writers from classical antiquity onwards have drawn analogies between the modes and the nature and properties of the planets and other heavenly bodies. Concerning the plagal version of the Dorian mode, Matthaei notes that ‘some [authors] have compared this mode to the Moon’.3