Organica (1645) is the most important collection, not only in the musical sense but also in the history of music printing, as it is perhaps the earliest engraved German music. It consists of 25 contrapuntal pieces. The first fourteen are preludes, 15-20 measures long, with no imitative idiom present, each starting with all voices together. The first six cover all church modes (one prelude for both authentic and plagal modes); the next six repeat this series transposing it down a fifth. The rest of the pieces of the collection are titled fuga: some are genuine fugues, others are based on chorale melodies and use them in a variety of ways, sometimes one phrase is answering another, other times the second phrase may be used for an interlude, etc. There is one remarkable triple fugue on chorale melodies, and an early example of chorale fugue (i.e. fugue on the first phrase of the chorale melody), a model which would later be extensively used by central German composers and, most importantly, Johann Pachelbel and J.S. Bach. The final piece of Harmonia Organica is a Magnificat setting, which begins and ends with a full-fledged improvisatory, free section. Different verses are treated differently: some as cantus firmus in one of the voices, one as a fugue, one as an echo, etc. Other surviving keyboard music by Kindermann includes a number of dances for the harpsichord. Kindermann's most important chamber music is perhaps the collection Canzoni, sonatae (1653), which includes one of the earliest, if not the earliest, use of scordatura in Germany. The pieces of the collection may be seen as precursors to Biber's work; all consist of several contrasting sections, as in similar works by Frescobaldi. Much of the other chamber music, for wind and string instruments, is modelled after Staden's pieces. There is also evidence of lost chamber music collections. References Hans Tischler, Willi Apel. "The History of Keyboard Music to 1700". 1972 Indiana University Press. Harold E. Samuel. "Johann Erasmus Kindermann", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy. grovemusic.com . External links 1616 births 1655 deaths 17th-century classical composers German Baroque composers German classical composers German male classical composers German classical organists German male organists Musicians from Nuremberg Organists and composers in the South German tradition Pupils of Johann Staden 17th-century male musicians Male classical organists