Mordecai (Markus) Sandberg () (February 4, 1897December 28, 1973) was a composer and physician. He was a creative and prolific composer, a musical theorist, and an innovative physician in the area of alternative and natural medicine in 1920s and 1930s Jerusalem. Sandberg was a pioneer in the field of microtonal theory and music. He believed that a microtonal system of music could be the basis of making “a music of humanity” that would bring people together from all cultures and transcend local traditions. He argued that although there seemed to be a conflict between the western and eastern tonal systems, there was in reality one music and one humanity. He developed his Universal Tonal System, a synthesis of oriental and occidental scales using microtones. He also designed several instruments and a notation system for microtonal music. As a composer of microtonal music Sandberg intended to translate and interpret the sacred texts of all the worlds’ religions to musical form. He began his monumental project with the Hebrew Bible, from his own European Jewish tradition. He theorized that microtonal music, incorporating the tonal traditions of Asia, was an appropriate means for setting Hebrew, an Oriental language, to music. Over the course of his life, Sandberg produced some twenty thousand pages of musical composition. His magnum opus was Symphonic Psalms, the setting of the Book of Psalms to music, a task which comprised more than twelve thousand pages of composition. Early life Sandberg was born in the town of Hârlău but grew up in Suceava in Bukovina, a province of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire. Sandberg studied medicine at the University of Vienna, during World War I, under such professors as Julius Tandler, a well known academic and political figure in Vienna at the time. While pursuing a medical education, Sandberg informally studied music. It was during this time that he began his earliest surviving creative work, Demosthenes, a play and later an overture which was completed in 1925. Although his studies were interrupted because of the war, Sandberg graduated from the University of Vienna in 1921 as a medical doctor. Move to Jerusalem After World War I, Austria ended its control over the city of Suceava, and in 1922 Sandberg moved to Jerusalem in the British Mandate of Palestine. There he opened a medical clinic utilizing alternative medical techniques, including vitamin and herbal therapies, diet change, and spiritual healing. His