It probably wasn't too good an idea of mine to post he
open letter here also, because I had just entered this
group several days before because of my interest in
Turkish tone systems. I had checked the messages
section for the WTC question out of curiosity,
stumbled into the long discussion some 2000 posts
back, and therefore decided to circulate my open
letter. The purpose wasn't to create an open dispute
here, and so far I have answered to responses directed
at me off-list. Bradley has in the meantime posted a
long explanation and apology in the harpsichord list
which explains a lot. For those interested, I am
adding my response to this post, hoping it isn't
considered spam. Now, where was that ney of mine?
Michael

Having read Bradley’s explanation and apology in the
HPSCHD-L list, I get the impression that he is also a
victim, a victim of a questionable editorial process.
He states that the reference to the original
discoverer of the squiggle hypothesis originally was
in the body text of his paper, but was buried in the
appendix by the editors. As a result, the reader was
forced to get the impression that the discovery was
Bradley’s. One must suspect, that the editors of Early
Music wanted to create this very impression, thus
upgrading the article to a “first”, which would rub
off on the magazine as such. This has nothing to do
with content but with procedure. It shows once more,
that journalistic principles of quoting and crediting,
the principles of conduct of scientific argument, are
a guideline which avoids what happened in the
aftermath of this article – that its content gets worn
down by procedural arguments.

I am not a tuning expert and never claimed to be one,
and I never published anything on the Sparschuh
hypothesis because I felt that the quick and dirty
solution which I had presented with the announcement
of Andreas’ discovery back in 2001 to the clavichord
newsgroup was far too conjectural to survive a decent
editorial screening. It matched with some of the
anecdotal evidence on Bach’s harpsichord tuning, i.e.
that he needed little time for tuning and that his
thirds were a bit sharp, but there were other
solutions possible for that. The important thing to me
was to present the original Sparschuh idea, which by
itself was also only hypothetical, but had a strong
intuitive appeal, and therefore it deserved to be
thrown into the arena of professional discourse. That
the draft opinion of mine ever made it into the
appendix of Early Music is embarrassing for me, I
never had claimed it to be a defensible theory, and I
never put any additional work into it. Worse, this
little sketch of mine is now presented in the EM
article as the theory of Andreas Sparschuh, who has
nothing to do with it. I outlined my opposing variant
because I felt that Andreas’ tuning, which he
presented in 2001 to a class of music students in
Frankfurt and which he backed by a table from the
mathematical yearbook, was highly questionable by
itself.

The procedural mistakes which overshadow the content
of Bradley’s paper thus were:
1. The credit to the original inventor of the squiggle
was deleted from the body text and pushed into the
annex.
2. The discussion of the Sparschuh thesis in this very
annex never concerned the Sparschuh thesis at all, but
my own sketchy post which never claimed to be a
scientific solution, and it was an opinion opposing
not quoting Sparschuh. Somebody, be it Bradley or the
editors, should have had a look at the source which
was my petty little post, and the discrepancy would
have become evident immediately.

Professional argument must decide on the merit of
Bradley’s and others’ solutions, but unfortunately a
discussion which should have concentrated on content
has been warped by procedural mistakes which should
never have happened in a serious article in a serious
scientific journal.

Michael






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