‘I have the greatest regard for Goehr, but I think his music gets worse and worse,’ one of our senior chroniclers of the avant-garde remarked to me some five years ago: ‘First it was neo-expressionism, then neo-romanticism, now it is neoclassicism—where will it end?’ To be fair, the same speaker has since endorsed with delight Goehr's setting of Psalm IV (1976). Moreover, any indictment of backsliding from historical necessity has been complicated, for instance, by the composition of the ‘expressionistic’ Symphony in One Movement (1970) two years after the ‘romantic’ Romanza for Cello and Orchestra (1968), and by Goehr's considerable success in approaching an ideal of piano writing as ‘a sort of Bach crossed with Debussy—polyphonic impressionism’ in Nonomiya (1969). And, as I have already argued, his reclamation of ‘historical’ procedures and genres could be seen as the necessary complement to the stability of the serial-modal, bloc sonore harmonic method he developed after the Two Choruses (1962)—in other words, as modifications and enrichments of a technique and aesthetic essentially deriving from the Modern Masters. Yet it must be admitted that any residual questions posed by such a synthesis would seem vastly more pressing in the light of his unexpected progress since the appearance of Psalm IV.