Hamburg was one of the most important centres of activity in the progress of North German organ music. Here Heinrich Scheidemann (about 1596-1663), who came of a family of organists, was the first to attain distinction. He was followed as organist of St. Catherine’s Church by his more famous pupil Johann Adam Reinken (1623-1722), who had also studied with Sweelinck. Few of his organ compositions have remained and these have no marks of special excellence, but he gained a great reputation as a performer. He had a large four-manual organ at St. Catherine’s and his great ability in performance and in improvisation on chorales attracted people from distant places. He was organist there for sixty years, retaining his full faculties until his death at the remarkable age of ninety-nine. Sebastian Bach twice journeyed on foot from Lüneberg to hear him play and was thereby greatly impressed and influenced. On a later visit (1720), after Bach himself had improvised for a half-hour on one of Reinken’s favorite chorales, the Nestor of German organists, then ninety-seven years old, exclaimed enthusiastically to the younger artist, ‘I thought this art would die with me, but I perceive that it lives in you.’ The chief characteristics of his organ-playing were unusual dexterity of foot and finger and ingenious combinations of stops. Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707), a Dane born at Helsingör, was the greatest of the North German group of organists and exerted a still more profound and stimulating influence on Bach. He was organist of the Marienkirche at Lübeck from 1667 till his death. With one of the finest organs in Germany at his disposal (three manuals with fifty-three stops, of which fifteen were on the pedal), he made Lübeck famous for its music. In 1673 he started an innovation in church-music that attracted international attention. This was a series of sacred concerts, called _Abendmusiken_, in connection with the Sunday afternoon services during November and December of each year, at which famous singers and players assisted. These performances were continued until early in the nineteenth century. In 1705 Sebastian Bach, then a youth of twenty years, walked fifty miles from Arnstadt to hear him in one of these performances and in 1703 Handel visited Lübeck for the same purpose. Buxtehude left many works for organ, the greatest of which are his fugues. Two volumes (edited by Spitta) contain most valuable music--in all about seventy works, consisting of passacaglias, chaconnes, three toccatas, fifteen fugues, and a large number of chorale-preludes. Many of these disclose the fact that he had brought organ music to a point of development that needed only the touch of Bach’s overpowering genius for consummation. Among the lesser figures that surround the giant Bach, Buxtehude towers highest. He modulated freely into all keys as Bach did, his harmonies were often as bold, and he welded the old threefold North German fugue into a close-knit,