Mark Ehlert wrote:

>Jeremey McMillan wrote in part:
>
>>I'm sure if Bach and Handel came out of their grave today, everything
>>would sound sharp to them.  If they heard Bb, they would hear it as an A.
>>They would have to recalibrate their ear and give the pitches in their
>>heads new names!
>
>They'd probably tear their hair out too when they discover all the scalar
>intervals and chords in all the keys are so "equal".  Where'd all the
>temperaments and various tonal colors go?

   "I shall always be sorry that we did not find out what Johann
   Sebastian Bach thought of our method of preserving music as if it
   had been pickles or strawberries.  But just when we were on the point
   of showing him the mechanical end of our concert, one of those things
   happened which none of us could possibly have foreseen and against
   which we could not in any way have protected ourselves....

   "....a dear old lady....from our beloved republic....had slip[ped]
   past our front door, and unobserved by anyone, she had gone directly
   into the kitchen, where the gramophone had been installed for that
   afternoon.  Jo Verlinde, who had volunteered to keep the instrument
   going (Veere did not boast of electricity), was under the impression
   that this stranger was one of the regular guests and, polite and
   obliging as always, she had offered no objections when the creature
   had put a record of her own choosing on the disk.  As for us, we knew
   nothing about her presence until suddenly we heard Bach's Fugue in
   G minor, originally written for the organ but now arranged for full
   orchestra by one of our most popular American conductors.  Once this
   fugue had been started, we had no other choice but to listen to it
   in silence until it should have come to an end, which it did with a
   terrific crash of brass and with a dozen bombardons going full blast.

   "Bach, we noticed, had listened with grave interest.  When it was
   finished, he said, 'That really was most interesting.  But what was
   it? Perhaps something by Vivaldi? In that case, he must have written
   it when he was quite young and still had a great deal to learn.'"

Taken from the chapter describing a visit by the Bachs and the Breughels to
the home in Veere of either the author or his friend Frits Philips in Van
Loon's *Lives*, pp.159-160 (1942).

Walter Meyer