polikimre wrote:Comparing the recordings and the editions I have access to I noticed quite a number of discrepancies, including entire section missing, notes changed, etc. Bach seems to be more canonized, at least to my superficial eye and ear.
The sources for Bux differ very much from one to another; the sources for Bach (most of which stem from the composer - there are some notable exceptions) don't. To put it another way: it looks as though Bux didn't care very much about the accuracy of the sources for his organ works, although he took a lot of care with his vocal works and with the things he had printed. Bach, by contrast, did care Bux was hardly alone; Sweelinck had the same attitude. There's no reason to think that Bux's copyists cared about the accuracy of the text any more than the composer did. (In fact, there's no reason to think that Bux wrote the things down in the first place: they might be transcriptions of his improvisations done by his students; if so, we have no way to guess at how accurate they might be.)
rhedgebeth wrote:I've always contended that the reason we have almost no organ music from Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven is that the organs in Austria were still in quarter comma which certainly did not fit their harmonic aesthetic.
Whoa, that's an interesting suggestion! On the other hand: the organs did play something, and Mozart, at least, sometimes played things on them; also the organ didn't have the prominent place in worship that it did in N Germany. More important, maybe, is that you can also argue that the fixed dynamics of the organ didn't fit their musical esthetic so well; same reason that the harpsichord gradually got superceeded by the piano. I think this would be a more conventional explanation (for whatever that's worth). But the two explanaitons do supplement each other: since re-tempering an organ is a major operation, it's not going to happen unless there's a strong musical incentive.
Have to look at the barrel-organ pieces with an eye (or ear) for temperament.