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This article investigates the seminal position of Dieterich Buxtehude in the history of organ pedalling, one of the crucial aspects of the north German organ art and one which set it apart not only from other forms of music-making but from the organ traditions of all other European nations. Although the chronology of Buxtehude ' s organ works cannot be established with any real specifi city, his solos seem to be the first fully formed examples to have survived. The most famous of these opens his Praeludium in C major, BuxWV 137. Pedalling like this is equally improbable as a form of physical movement as it is a mode of musical discourse, yet this epoch-making solo succeeds by the force of a bravura that uses massive organ sound to convey to distant listeners the motion of the body. So convincing was Buxtehude ' s essay in pedal rhetoric that it continues to captivate because of its freshness and its monumentality.
This article makes several observations concerning the nature and origins of Buxtehude ' s organ works as a result of studying the music in relation to contemporary modal theory, as found in the treatises of Conrad Matthaei and Christoph Bernhard. After a brief consideration of the Passacaglia, BuxWV161, and Buxtehude ' s handling of modes in his organ chorales, the study focuses on the so-called ' free ' works and their relationship to the church tones, following a line of investigation first proposed by William Porter, concentrating on tones V, III/IV and I/IX. Buxtehude ' s organ music emerges as being more deeply rooted in the liturgy than previously thought. Central to this thesis are two of the most regular and important liturgical chants, the Magnificat and Te Deum . The author links the Toccata, BuxWV 155, with the Magnificat and the Praeludium, BuxWV152, and Praeambulum, BuxWV 158, with the Te Deum, providing supporting evidence from the works of Buxtehude ' s contemporaries including Radeck, Weckmann, Flor, Kniller and Morhardt, and anonymous works in the Lüneburg tablatures. This line of inquiry also provides a framework for studying Buxtehude ' s harmonic practice by associating certain idioms with certain tones, and seeing how Buxtehude makes use of them in other contexts. Finally, it is suggested that the playing styles associated with the Te Deum may have been partly responsible for the very essence of the rhetorical and imposing style of Buxtehude and his North German contemporaries.
The Düben collection, now held at Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek, is the chief repository for Dieterich Buxtehude ' s vocal music. This article presents a number of new fi ndings made by the author in connection with a larger study of the genesis of the collection. A study of paper-types leads to the suggestion that the performing parts of Das neugeborne Kindelein (BuxWV 13), O wie selig (BuxWV 90) and Was mich auf dieser Welt (BuxWV 105) may be original sets from Lübeck. The parts for Aperite mihi porta (BuxWV 7) are confirmed as autograph; and the parts for Herr, ich lasse dich nicht (BuxWV 36) are newly identifi ed as being in Buxtehude ' s hand, a discovery that has implications for performance practice.
2007, the 300th anniversary of the death of Dieterich Buxtehude, is a good moment to survey recordings of his music for what they reveal about current trends in performing late 17th-century music. The articlesurveys a cross-section of CDs of Buxtehude ' s organ music, clavier music, instrumental ensemble music and sacred vocal music. Issues discussed include the choice of suitable organs, temperament, registration and the interpretation of the stylus phantasticus, the identity of Buxtehude ' s ' violone ' and continuo scoring, the number of singers and instrumentalists in the concerted music, tempo, pitch and an appropriate style of singing for Buxtehude. A recurring problem is the concept of ' Baroque music ' , which leads to the assumption that there is a common performing style for 17th- and 18thcentury music, and to the unthinking acceptance of an anachronistic style for Buxtehude derived from mid-18thcentury practice.
The article examines a simple possibility pertaining to the performance of theatrical dance in opera in the Restoration English theatre, namely that the existence of many of the dances and their accompanying music in 17th- and early 18th-century English operas is hidden in the context and score of the just-performed vocal numbers. The possibility that this could be the case in one or two specific instances has been raised elsewhere, but this article considers the evidence for the expansion of these cases into a more general convention. There can be no dispute that the role of dance in dramatick opera is a significant one. In the 11 or so works in the genre written and performed in London between 1690 and 1706, there are some 71 dances indicated in the surviving play-texts; as the period progresses, hardly an act passes by the audience without one. They became one of opera ' s drawcards and range widely in type and style. The article proposes that there was more dancing than even the already copious amounts indicated in the printed sources; the repeats proposed—particularly the final ones in musical sequences—could hold the solution to the problem of some of the apparently ' missing ' dances and resolve issues raised by attempts to co-ordinate musical and spoken sources.
The ballets des nations set to music by Jean-Baptiste Lully and André Campra in Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670) and L' Europe galante (1697) are probably the most famous 17th-century representations of national characters through music and dance. A less well-known work, Europe's revels for the peace of Ryswick, provides important clues as to how national characters were danced on-stage and how they might be interpreted in contemporary London by English audiences.
By the end of the 17th century one of the most infl uential dancing-masters in London was Mr Isaac. His success was due not only to his own abilities as a dancing-master and to his contacts with the highest levels of London society, but also to the publication of his dances in a new system of dance notation available in London by 1706. He was the first London dancing-master to benefi t on a large scale from this innovation, and 22 of his dances survive as publications issued after 1706. They represent dances created for performance at court, many of them to celebrate the birthdays of Queen Anne or of other members of the royal family, and subsequently sold in notated form as souvenirs and for pedagogic purposes. More significantly, they also suggest that Mr Isaac was working at a time of transition after which royal birthday dances presented at court were as likely to be performed by professionals as by courtiers, and thus were sometimes taken into the commercial theatre. This article also addresses the unresolved question of the identity of Mr Isaac, and examines the likelihood that he was Edward Isaac, a Catholic dancing-master associated with the circle of musicians and dancers working for the Stuart royal family after the Restoration.
The text of Thomas Tallis ' s seven-voice motet Suscipe quaeso Domine is not (as has previously been suggested) a liturgical collect or a piece of Marian Catholic pro paganda. It is taken from a devotional soliloquy by the early medieval churchman and polymath Isidore of Seville. This fact links it closely to Byrd ' s motet Tribue Domine, which appears near it in the 1575 Cantiones, quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur. In an era marked by escalating religious controversy, both composers chose to adorn their musical offering to Queen Elizabeth with large-scale settings of patristic or quasi-patristic texts, an implicit nod to the era of at least nominally undivided Christianity.
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