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Heinrich Scheidemann's Keyboard Music: Transmission, Style, and Chronology.

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Heinrich Scheidemann's Keyboard Music: Transmission, Style, and Chronology. By Pieter Dirksen. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. [xxiii, 254 p. ISBN-10 0754654419; ISBN-13 9780754654414. $99.95.] Illustrations, maps, music examples, bibliographic references, index.

Heinrich Scheidemann (ca. 1595-1663) has emerged in recent decades as perhaps the most important and original north German organist-composer of the early baroque. The author of the present volume has previously published a major study of Sweelinck, Scheidemann's teacher (The Keyboard Music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck: Its Style, Significance, and Influence [Utrecht: Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1997], reviewed by this writer in Notes 55, no. 1 [September 1998]: 95-97). Both books focus on the difficult questions of authorship and chronology that afflict works attributed to the two composers.

This book presents a wealth of new information about sources, individual works, and certain issues of performance practice, and therefore will be appropriate not only for research collections but for those serving performers, especially keyboard players. Unfortunately, readers not already familiar with the music and previous relevant scholarship may be hard pressed to follow the author's dense, sometimes unidiomatic prose. Specialists will recognize that some of the inferences drawn about attribution and chronology are not clearly supported by the evidence cited. Dirksen makes little effort to situate Scheidemann and his music within their cultural-historical context, and he accepts without discussion the genre categories and analytical approaches to this music established by previous scholars, notably Werner Breig in the only previous monograph on the subject (Die Orgelwerke von Heinrich Scheidemann. Beihefte zum Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft, Bd. 3 [Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1967]).

For many readers the most interesting matter may fall toward the end of the book, where a chapter on keyboard technique includes many music examples containing contemporary fingerings. Although there is no reason...

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