Henk Dieben

The name Henk Dieben (1902-1956) has been mentioned a few times
by Herbert Anton Kellner. I can give some background information
about him out of an article by Thijs Kramer. The reasons that his
work is unfortunately relatively unknown are his untimely death and
the fact that he postponed writing a book because he kept finding
more and more material.

Ruth Tatlow wrote an article in _Music and Letters_ about Dieben,
"the Dutch pianist, who had an interest in number symbolism. In
March 1943 he had solved for Smend the puzzle of Picander's
_Paragramma Cabbalisticum trigonale_ by explaining to him the
trigonal alphabet. Smend (...) nowhere acknowledged in print that it
was Dieben who had shown him the solution to Picander's paragram."
It was not the last time that Dieben would be plundered.
Wilhelm Werker was the first in 1922 to demonstrate that numbers
are an important construction factor in the music of Bach. Dieben
knew this and became curious after finding a book titled _Deutsche
Caballa_ which explained number alphabets. He discovered in 1933
that according to the Latin alphabet (A=1; I,J=9; U,V=20; Z=24),
among others the numbers 14 (Bach), 29 (JSB, Soli Deo Gloria), 41
(J.S. Bach) and 48 (2x1x3x8) represent an important factor in Bach's
work. The changing of letters into numbers and vice versa is called
gematria. Smend had spent 20 years finding biblical numbers in
Bach's work but until Dieben told him he didn't know about the use
of gematria by Bach. After several years Dieben had discovered
enough to start giving lectures. After the war he became teacher at
the Muzieklyceum in Amsterdam and occasionally gave lectures to add
a bit to his very little income. His family suffered for his passion
for Bach and it made him forget his lessons; he counted, combined,
speculated and counted, with help of his wife. After his death, the
piano had to be sold to pay for the funeral.
When Piet Ketting, the director of the Muzieklyceum hired him,
they made the explicit agreement that Dieben alone would give
lectures. When Dieben found out that Ketting did give lectures, he
broke the relation off abruptly. Before he died, he told his wife
not to give the manuscripts to Ketting. They went via Hans Brandt
Buys to Gustav Leonhardt who, not knowing about Dieben's last words,
handed them to Ketting for reading and donated them to the
university of Utrecht.
Ketting got stuck in his own research and started a cooperation
with the mathematician J. Bronkhorst. The latter did many
discoveries, wrote a book but failed to give Ketting the necessary
credit, which resulted in both hiring lawyers and Dieben's
manuscript not getting a publisher again. Two pupils of Ketting, van
Houten and Kasbergen, then published a book shortly after Ketting's
death, presenting the work of Dieben, Ketting and Bronkhorst as it
were their own, while also containing a lot of nonsense.
The more than ten thousand pages of the legacy with calculations,
drawings and tables are now kept in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.
The two most important discoveries of Dieben are that Bach used
gematria, and that Bach had affinity to the realm of ideas of the
Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, the Rosicrucians.

Myself I'm very sceptical that Bach numerology has anything to do
with tuning however.

There is a Belgian C. Coppens at the university of Gent who wrote a
1200-page thesis in Dutch about number symbolism in the WTC.
If anyone wants to find more, one could try an Internet search on
these people:
Henk Dieben
Wilhelm Werker
Thijs Kramer
Harry Hahn
Friedrich Smend
Ruth Tatlow

A few links:
http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Numbers.htm
http://www.music.qub.ac.uk/~tomita/WTC2Psalm/
http://users.castel.nl/~schic02/appendix.htm
http://www.nrc.nl/W2/Lab/Profiel/Bach/getal.html (goede grap onderaan)

Manuel