Description
Dieterich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri (1680) comprises a cycle of seven Passion cantatas, each a meditation on an isolated body part of the crucified Jesus. The manuscript source, one of few to survive in Buxtehude’s hand, exists not in typical staff notation but in German organ tablature: a specialized graphic system that functions as a “map” for the body, eschewing visual melodic contours in favor of physical keys to be touched by human fingers. Responding to Buxtehude’s embodied notation system, this talk probes his musical-textual rhetoric to reveal a musical grammar of “sweet” wounds, blood, and milk—that has evaded scrutiny over the centuries since the work’s rediscovery to historians. With this remarkable piece as a laboratory, join musicologist Malachai Komanoff Bandy on a journey through archival sources, to reattune our modern eyes and ears to seventeenth-century ways of thinking about music, meaning, and the bodies that make both.
About the Speaker
Multi-instrumentalist Malachai Bandy is Assistant Professor of Music at Pomona College (founding college of the Claremont Colleges Consortium near Los Angeles), where he teaches music history courses handling topics ranging from musical symbolism, esotericism, and rhetoric to music and queer identities. He holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from the USC Thornton School of Music and in 2025 won the Wig Distinguished Professor Award at Pomona College. Malachai’s musicological work handling number symbolism in Baroque music has received the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music’s Irene Alm Memorial Prize and the Ingolf Dahl Award in Musicology, and his projects have been supported by a Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America and the Diversity and Inclusion Research Award from the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.
As a historical string and double-reed player, Malachai has performed on strings and winds with ensembles such as Voices of Music, Bach Collegium San Diego, Ciaramella, and the Los Angeles Opera, and toured as a soloist with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, with whom he opened the Salzburg Festival in 2023. As a recording artist for TV and film, his solos can be heard on the soundtracks to titles such as Outlander, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Foundation, The Witcher, Percy Jackson, God of War, and many more. Malachai’s written work concerns Christian mysticism and occult philosophy in North-German Baroque music. As current Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee fellow at the Newberry, he is currently at work on his first book, which handles musical symbolism and mystical theology in the 1680 Passion cycle Membra Jesu nostri, the topic of today’s talk.
About Colloquium
Colloquium is a weekly series of talks featuring staff, fellows, and scholars who are working with the library’s vast collections. These events bring together experts from various fields to share their research on a wide range of topics, followed by an opportunity for the audience to ask questions and engage in conversation.
Colloquium is open to the public and offers a chance to explore fascinating ideas and new discoveries. No advance registration is required.