Musicology Lecture: Malachai Bandy, Pomona College

"Remembering Your Wounds: Sensing Jesus's Body in Membra Jesu nostri (1680)"

Dieterich Buxtehude's Membra Jesu nostri (1680) comprises a cycle of seven Passion cantatas, each addressing 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 craft to reveal a rhetoric of "sweet" wounds, blood, and milk-for example, in his strategic deployment of the arcane harmonic technique Fauxbourdon in this and other works-that has evaded scholarly scrutiny. The cycle's "dismembered" dispositio into individual body parts meanwhile evokes tracts by 17th-c. scientist-mystics whose discourses employ unconventional bodies as symbols of resurrection: the androgynous Adam and hermaphroditic "REBIS" achieve perfection in the alchemical flask through dismemberment-a trope then (re-)applied to images of Jesus in contemporary emblems. When placed in conversation with such artifacts to which it textually alludes, Membra Jesu nostri challenges us to reattune our modern eyes and ears to earlier understandings of music, meaning, and the bodies that make both.

Speaker Bio:
Multi-Instrumentalist Malachai Komanoff Bandy is Assistant Professor of Music at Pomona College and 2025 winner of Pomona's Wig Distinguished Professor Award for excellence in teaching. He holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from the University of Southern California. As a performer on historical strings and winds, Malachai is founder and director of Artifex Consort (Los Angeles) and has recently appeared with ensembles such as Bach Collegium San Diego, Tesserae, Voices of Music, The Gesualdo Six, and as a soloist with the Los Angeles Opera. As a recording artist, he is featured in the scores to Outlander, The Rings of Power, Foundation, and many more. Malachai's written work primarily concerns symbolism, rhetoric, and Christian mysticism in the German Baroque and has won the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music's Irene Alm Memorial Prize, the Ingolf Dahl Award in Musicology, a Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America, a long-term fellowship from the Newberry Library, and others.