Illumina nos is the final “sacred song” in a book of twenty printed in Naples by Constantino Vitali and published there in 1603 by Don Giovanni Pietro Cappuccio. It is the only piece in the book requiring seven voices: the others are six-part polyphony. In the same year the same printer and publisher brought out a volume of nineteen five-voice “sacrae cantiones” by Gesualdo. Both of these volumes were marked “Liber Primus,” but if other books were published no copies are known to survive. Then in 1611, Giovanni Jacomo Carlino printed in Naples a book of twenty-six six-voice “Responses” by Gesualdo. These three volumes contain all that is known of Gesualdo's sacred music, and the only known copies of these volumes are in the library of the “Oratorio dei Filippini” at Naples. In 1934 Guido Pannain included fourteen of the five-voice sacred songs in a collection of “La polifonia cinquecentesca ed i primordi del secolo XVII di Napoli.” At this time Pannain discovered that the sextus and bassus parts of the six-voice volume were missing (a catalogue of the “archivio dell” oratorio Filippini” listing all three volumes had been published in Parma in 1918, but apparently no one before Pannain had examined the music). Not until 1955 were photo copies obtainable of the other “sacred songs” and of the “Responses.” Since then Mrs. Ruth Adams of the University of California in Los Angeles has transcribed the five five-voice pieces not published by Pannain, and the whole book of “Responses“ which includes a psalm setting and part of a Tenebrae Service.

“We know that even in ‘lyrical’ performances in the theatre a conflict exists between the dramatic action, which must move on, and the musical composition, which by its nature holds back. How should we reconcile the conflict between the beauty of a formal medium of expression, music, with the speed which is characteristic of every type of film?”

Ruggiero Leoncavallo tells us that his most successful opera I Pagliacci was accepted by the publisher Sonzogno after he had read only the libretto. Perhaps this was not so hasty and ill-considered a decision as, at first sight, it may appear, for a “book” as unfailingly effective as that of I Pagliacci is almost fool-proof; besides, a really dramatic libretto is a tremendous incentive to an imaginative composer. Triumphantly Bizet emerges from the slightly sentimental romanticism of his early operas the moment he receives Daudet's moving Arlésienne and, shortly afterwards, the spectacular libretto of Carmen. Moreover, we have only to note how Verdi's powers soared when, in his extreme old age, they were stimulated by Boito, a librettist at last worthy of his great collaborator's genius.

It is the aim of the British Institute of Recorded Sound to preserve copies of all published, and some unpublished, records of music, speech, animal and other varieties of sound in a collection on lines similar to that of printed matter in the British Museum Library. So far as music is concerned, the present aim is to obtain copies of records as they are published and to rescue as many of those made since recording first began, irrespective of their current value. It is of course impossible to predict the degree of value of any particular record—as to its music, performance, recording, or documentary interest—and it is quite probable that many will share the fate of Dussek's piano sonatas in relation to those of his contemporaries Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. It is fairly predictable however that records of Bartók, for instance, playing his own piano pieces will be of immense value for a very long time, in spite of the inferiority of the actual recording. But the Institute has no intention of forcing any kind of discrimination on the future—restriction is unavoidable, as with the Tate Gallery, only through an insufficiency of funds. Ideally its appetite must be gargantuan; classical and jive, romantic ballet and rock ‘n’ roll, Antonio's castanets and African drums, the voices of Flagstad, Norman Wisdom and Florence Foster Jenkins are all desired for its archives. Speech and music of the present day should be represented fully and impartially, and the future student be permitted to draw his own conclusions.

PÁL KADOSA (1905) represents the German tradition among his contemporaries, and in this regard he might be said to continue the course indicated by Weiner and Jemnitz. But whereas Weiner's music is anchored in the romantics and Jemnitz's in the expressionist school of Reger and Schoenberg, Kadosa's model was the music of the young German post-First-World-War school, of which Hindemith was the leading figure. Another factor contributing a great deal to the formation of his idiom was his being a practical musician, a pianist of considerable gifts. These two considerations, viz. Hindemith and the piano, inevitably dominate the instrumental character of his music as a whole. What distinguishes his work from that of the German father-figure is the strong influence of Hungarian folk-music in the rhythmic element of his music. It came via Bartók, since Kadosa did not take active part in folk-music-collecting. His mature personal style is predominantly contrapuntal, terse and detached to the point of austerity; and since he thinks in patterns of motivic figurations, it possesses marked rhythmic and dynamic power. The baroque revival of the nineteen-twenties and 'thirties—whose German version was associated with an impersonal “New Objectivity”—is reflected in his series of concertos—including four for the piano, two for the violin, one for the viola, and one for string-quartet and orchestra—precise, often epigrammatic in utterance, showing a kind of restrained and diffident lyricism that is so typical of Kadosa, and conceived in terms of brilliantly effective instrumental writing.