The use of music for work, marches, the stimulation of mass sentiment or emotional impact (patriotism, war, etc.), for entertainment, oblivion, mood change, mood creation, and background music for motion pictures, evokes realistic responses, where music is applied for its effect, rather than for its intrinsic value. It is therefore no surprise that the applied use of music (which has nothing to do with the active process of artistic creation) should be used in the care and treatment of the sick mind and body. I do not know what subjective responses result from such purely physical phenomena as vibration and harmonics but I am convinced that listeners are physiologically and psychically effected by such musical characteristics as mood, intensity, pitch and rhythmical outline. It seems to me that the right music should provoke remembrance and association of thoughts and situations more easily in a mental patient than methods using factual persuasion. Music can avoid the realistic approach and by its absolute progression abstractly recreate a familiarity of situation which may prove most useful in handling mental patients. By eliciting a desired mood it may offer the physician a method of handling disease as important as shock, and a result obtainable in no other way. To a musician, completely unfamiliar with medicine and pathology this use seems obvious and undeniable. Dr. Licht has made a thorough study of this subject and has indicated some of the many uses of music in mental and physical pathology. The work which has been based on scientific research and clinical experience is most impressive and encouraging. If we, as musicians, can bring our contribution to such a wonderful purpose as healing, it would certainly be our most glorious accomplishment for mankind, and the noblest use of our art. But, as I have said, aesthetically it should not be the aim but the effect of art which should be considered. If _applied use_ rather than creation were to assume greater importance, art would lose its essential characteristics and would become a social manifestation of mass production instead of an abstract phenomenon. It might work out usefully, perhaps for a time, but in losing those primordial elements which condition its own existence, it would also lose the _effects_ which its use provoke not only in medicine but in other important directions. The effects of music will progress satisfactorily to the advantage of mankind only as long as it is permitted its normal development regardless of motivations and their justifications. In the long run it will find a greater and better use in the practical sense, if its creation continues along traditional lines, and is not diverted into the fallacious channel of anonymous mass production with consequent loss of proper utility and aesthetic _raison d’etre_.