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. Multi-instrumentalist Malachai Komanoff Bandy is Assistant Professor of Music at Pomona College (near Los Angeles), where he teaches music history courses primarily handling musical symbolism, esotericism, and rhetoric. He holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from the USC Thornton School of Music and in 2025 won Pomona College’s Wig Distinguished Professor Award for excellence in teaching. As a historical string and double-reed player, Malachai regularly performs with ensembles including Voices of Music, Bach Collegium San Diego, and Ciaramella, has performed as a soloist with the Los Angeles Opera, and toured with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, with whom he opened the Salzburg Festival in 2023. As a recording artist for TV and film, his solos can be heard on the soundtracks to titles such as Outlander, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Foundation, Percy Jackson, and many more. As a musicologist, Malachai’s written work primarily concerns Christian mysticism and occult philosophy in North-German Baroque music, with recent work readable in the journal Early Music and in the volumes Explorations in Music and Esotericism (University of Rochester Press, 2023) and Jesuit Rhetoric Across Space and Time (Brill, 2026). His investigations of number symbolism in Baroque repertoires received both the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music’s Irene Alm Memorial Prize and the Ingolf Dahl Award in Musicology, with projects supported by a Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America and the Diversity and Inclusion Research Award from the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music. As 2025–26 Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee long-term fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago, he is currently at work on his first book, which handles musical symbolism and mystical theology in the 1680 Passion cycle Membra Jesu nostri, the topic of his colloquium talk. This event is free and open to the public.