This double-disc set offers a group of Buxtehude organ works, opening with the celebrated Praeludium in C major, BuxWV 137, performed on a magnificent Swedish organ tuned in so-called mean-tone tuning. The booklet, which contains a good deal of fascinating information about Buxtehude and about the role organs played in North Germany's mercantile society, might have addressed for general listeners exactly what mean-tone tuning is, but organists have a tendency to speak to their own kind with their recordings. Mean-tone ...
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This double-disc set offers a group of Buxtehude organ works, opening with the celebrated Praeludium in C major, BuxWV 137, performed on a magnificent Swedish organ tuned in so-called mean-tone tuning. The booklet, which contains a good deal of fascinating information about Buxtehude and about the role organs played in North Germany's mercantile society, might have addressed for general listeners exactly what mean-tone tuning is, but organists have a tendency to speak to their own kind with their recordings. Mean-tone tuning, in a word, is based on perfectly tuned major thirds rather than on the perfect fifths from which earlier tuning systems were mostly derived, and which gave birth to the circle-of-fifths theoretical concept that beginning musicians still learn today. It takes its name from the fact that the whole step in this system is defined as the mean between the two tones of a major third. The "advantage" of mean-tone tuning is that the big major chords of Buxtehude's music have an unusually...
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