ABSTRACT
Mattheson, for all his chronological distance to the topic, managed to touch upon some central traits of Scheidemann's music, like his keyboard specialization, which was unusual for the period, or the absence of wayward and complex polyphony. There can be indeed no doubt that, along with the actual time of origin of the works in question, Scheidemann's keyboard style firmly belongs to the first half of the century, if not to the period before. Perhaps Scheidemann felt he had composed enough music in the 1620s and 1630s, and his dominating presence in the North German transmission up to c. 1675 proved him right. Scheidemann continued to compose chorale cycles, praeambula as well as a few harpsichord pieces. While the initial steps towards the composition of Magnificat cycle may already have been taken in the late 1620s, its closed and almost exclusive transmission in the first part of Ze1 suggests an origin principally in the 1630s.
