Translation And Review Of Selected Literatures On Bach's Temperament By European And American Scholars In The Early 21st Century

Bradley Lehman studied on Bach's hand-drawn spiral pattern and published his research on the Bach's temperament in 2005,followed by a number of scholars commenting on this issue by means of published articles,letters and online messages,which led to a second discussion in the field of history temperament with a certain scale.The first part of this paper includes the complete translations of literatures of seven authors,such as Bradley Lehman,John Charles Francis,T.Dent,Luigi Swich,Mark Lindley,John O'Donnel and Ibo Ortgies,delivering the latest insights and viewpoints of the Bach's temperament.The second part is a review on the whole event intergrading with other available materials including the German manuscript by Sparschuh and Lehman's academic website.This paper reiterates the western consensus that Bach did not use the equal temperament,and puts forward that the unequal temperament has an extraordinary acoustics effect that can not be seen from the music scores.And the terms with multiple translations and terms that have not been translated will be discussed in the paper as well.