Tom Dent asked:
 > Why try to bracket Buxtehude (born 1630's) and Boehm (born 1660's)
 > together?  [...in my practical quest to find a stylistically suitable 
 > and easy-to-set temperament that can play the music of both, based on 
 > approximately 1/5 comma naturals...]

Oh, I don't know; maybe it was just a whim of mine, observing that the 
texture of the actual music (at least in the dance suite movements) is 
so similar under the fingers: all of it could be so easily confused with 
Reincken's (born 1623)!  And, as I already pointed out in the roster of 
all the Böhm pieces, one of *his* attributed suites in E-flat has only 
recently been identified as being by Froberger.  (By my calculations, 
Froberger was already deceased before Böhm turned six years old...and 
yet, some of their work was stylistically similar enough to get shuffled 
together for generations, in critical editions.)  The Breitkopf edition 
8290 of Reincken happens to have some Froberger in it, too: Die Meierin. 
  And the last piece in that Reincken book is a long G major toccata 
that happens to need both Bb and A#.

Maybe I'm just lazy, as I like to play through these stacks of fine 
music without stopping to retune accidentals every eight minutes.  Maybe 
I'd like to play music by several of these gentlemen all in the same 
concert sometime.


Tom asked further:
 > Why discard the possibility of having any pure thirds at all? The real
 > contrast is between tunings with pure thirds (not necessarily 8 of
 > them) and those where nothing is pure. 3 varieties of
 > Werckmeister-like tuning are just 3 types of spaghetti with meatballs
 > when you could have osso buco.

Maybe I believe Mark Lindley's "Temperaments" article in _New Grove_, 
where he pointed out that 1/5 comma was prevalent (and perhaps even more 
common/widespread than 1/4 comma) during the 17th century.  And maybe, 
part of it also is that 1/5 comma naturals give a more lively and 
interesting sound than 1/4 comma, on the several harpsichords where I 
practice most frequently.  I've gotta go with what I believe sounds good 
and plausible on the instruments I actually play.


Brad Lehman