Fascinating Or Crackpot

Musicologist and blogger Charles T. Downey of Ionarts posts about a fairly new discovery in the field of Bach scholarship wherein musicologist and Bach scholar Bradley Lehman claims to have finally discovered the key (N.P.I.) to determining the exact temperament used by Bach to tune his keyboard instruments, that key being a graphic code devised by Bach, and displayed in plain sight in Bach's hand-drawn border design at the top of the title page of the manuscript of The Well-tempered Clavier.

I came across a report on this purported discovery early last month, but posted nothing here as a real understanding of the published research and its conclusions is beyond my meager competence in the fields involved. That notwithstanding, it did strike me that something seemed not quite kosher about Dr. Lehman's claim. As I wrote in a 14 February post on a classical music forum in which I occasionally participate:

I trust you all know there are myriad so-called temperaments that can be used in tuning a scale on a keyboard instrument, our present equal temperament being only one of them. It's been known for some time now that Bach did NOT tune his keyboard instruments using equal temperament, the temperament he actually did use being a matter of educated and speculative guesswork for decades. The guy whose website I linked to [i.e., Bradley Lehman's website] claims to have discovered, in the most unlikely of places, Bach's own *coded* record of the exact temperament he used to tune his instruments for the playing of both books of the WTC -- at least. Why Bach should have made a secret of that tuning, revealing it only in arcane, graphically coded form, is beyond me, and makes me view Lehman's claim with a fairly substantial measure of suspicion.

Well, now that professional musicologist Sherlock Downey is on the case, perhaps he'll in time be able to clear up that particular matter for us nonprofessionals, confirming or refuting my uninformed civilian suspicions.