Berthold Goldschmidt is 80 this year. It would be pleasant to record that his birthday was being celebrated with widespread performances of his music, but sadly this is not the case. His adopted country—Goldschmidt has lived in England since 1935 and took British nationality in 1947—has remained largely indifferent to him as a composer. None of the works he has written in this country has yet been published, and the most ambitious of them, the opera Beatrice Cenci, has not been performed. This article, together with forthcoming articles on Goldschmidt's music to be published in a future issue of TEMPO, will, it is hoped, do a little towards the rehabilitation of a scandalously neglected composer.

Over the whole of the historical period of instrumental music, Western music has based itself upon an acoustical lie. In our time this lie—that the normal musical ear hears twelve equal intervals within the span of an octave—has led to the impoverishment of pitch usage in our music.

Any imaginative hypothesis must be seminal, and Jonathan Harvey's is no exception. As he points out, a number of composers have been fascinated by the idea of harmonic structures radiating above and below a central axis in reflecting intervals. He says ‘from either side’ rather than ‘above and below’, and perhaps advisedly, for as soon as the concept of ‘below’ is permitted, so is that of gravity. The thesis depends on the removal of gravity in what is essentially a placeless, directionless space, without perceptible ups, downs, or sides. Swedenborg's rarified and not altogether realistic ideas come from a mysticism that is unclear about the nature of space. There are relative directions in space; it has dimensions; it is full of energy and radiation; in it gravity is inescapable. A man floating between earth and moon may not be aware of it, but he will drift in one direction or the other, according to which gravitational pull is the stronger. We can estimate at least roughly the distances between the galaxies, and their relative positions, their rates of movement away from each other if they do not belong to the same group. If the theory that in music the bass has moved to the middle refers to the apparent absence of an absolute bottom to the universe, it can be regarded as at least plausible, though without much basis in actual experience, and scarcely susceptible to proof. Where is this axis from which things radiate? It is not, presumably, a fixed and all too audible persistent internal pedal. No doubt it was there at the beginning, like the Big Bang, to be afterwards detected only by means of some residual musical radiation. It becomes an imaginary, or remembered, point.

After the success of the Psalmus Hungaricus, His Master's Voice accepted M. D. Calvocoressi's suggestion that it should make recordings in Budapest of the finest pieces of the Hungarian Folk Music cycle, with Béla Bartók as pianist and the best Hungarian Kodály singers. Thus the first recordings of Kodály works were inspired by an English source.