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David Schulenberg, Bach’s temperament, Early Music, Volume 40, Issue 1, February 2012, Pages 166–167, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cas025
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Luigi Swich (‘Further thoughts on Bach's 1722 temperament’ (Early Music, xxxix/3 (2011) pp.401–7) is the most recent contributor to Early Music to accept as fact the hypothesis that twelve swirls across the title-page of Bach's autograph score of the ‘48’ (Part I) are not an ornamental design but a code for a tuning system.
Were this design really a code, however, one would expect knowledge of it to have been imparted to Bach's pupils, at least those closest to him. Yet the idea is absent from writings by Kirnberger, C. P. E. Bach and other members of the Bach circle who expressed an interest in tuning and temperament. Nor do any of the numerous manuscript copies of the Well-Tempered Clavier incorporate the design in a way that could faithfully replicate the code. Indeed, what is perhaps the closest copy of the score, one that faithfully reproduces most details of the title-page, includes the swirls above the title, but only ten of them, and without the extra touches that are supposed to signify distinctions in the exact tuning of some of the intervals.
