Dear Francis,

in the latest ‚Clavichord International’, you as the
editor of the publication announce that for the
November issue “Dr. Bradley Lehman is also writing an
article for us on his exciting and controversial
discovery of ‘the’ Bach temperament (discussed in two
articles in Early Music this year)”. In the Clavichord
Yahoogroup whose owner-moderator I am, and whose
member Brad Lehman has been since 1998, I had on
January 24, 2001 outlined that Andreas Sparschuh of
Germany had made this discovery back in 1998. Andreas
had written a long article with extensive mathematical
and theoretical work which appeared in the German
Mathematicians’ Association 1999 yearbook, and he had
earned the Golden Tuning Fork Award of the German
Tuners’ Association for it. So anything Bradley could
have “discovered” was an alternate solution to the
Sparschuh hypothesis. That he dismisses Andreas as
somebody who only has a “vague idea” on his private
homepage in my opinion is a disrespectful way of
presenting his own work as the first scientific effort
on this theme. This, and his complete omission of
Andreas Sparschuh’s name and discovery in the Early
Music article makes him a plagiarizer, nothing less. I
have long been silent on this issue, because my own
role, apart from presenting a dissenting opinion on
the Sparschuh Tuning, was the one of the distributor
of Andreas’ discovery to a music world that does not
read mathematical yearbooks in Hun language, and my
position as the moderator of the Clavichord Group
forbade a strong intervention on my own behalf. But I
must urge you as the publisher of Clavichord
International to employ the necessary due diligence of
at least presenting the facts, and not repeat
Bradley’s and Early Music’s mistake of omitting
Andreas’ work and opinion.
I am sending this as an open letter to both the Tuning
and the Clavichord Yahoogroups, as an effort to pay
justice to a kind German mathematician who isn’t a
member of either of them.
Michael
N.B. In case you want to get in contact with Andreas,
his e-mail address is in the CC section of this mail.








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