This necessarily brief and partial summary concerns the development of the American music public. From this public the first impulses toward actual musical production in America arose. A natural consequence of these developments, musical instruction kept pace with them. Among those who received such instruction there were a few ambitious individuals. The general topic of music education in the United States will be discussed later; we here note in passing that much of the best in music education of the earlier days was contributed by immigrants--like the already mentioned Manuel Garcia--from the music centers of Europe. It was inevitable that, until very recent years (mention of this was made previously), anyone who wished to accomplish something serious was obliged to go to Europe for his decisive studies; it is also inevitable that what they produced bore traces of derivation from the various milieus--generally German or Viennese--in which they studied. Nor is it surprising that this derivation generally bore a cautious and hesitant aspect, and that the American contemporaries of Mahler and Strauss are most frequently epigenes rather of Mendelssohn or Liszt. Some acquired a solid craft, if not a bold or resourceful one; in the eighteen-nineties they were following in the footsteps of the midcentury romanticists, just as, twenty years later, their successors cautiously began to retrace the footsteps of the early Debussy. There were, of course, other elements too, such as those derived from folklore and, even at that time and in a very cautious manner, from popular music. One cannot speak of the composers of the turn of the century without expressing the deep respect due them. They were isolated, having been born into an environment unprepared for what they wanted to do, an environment which did not supply them with either the resources or the moral support necessary for accomplishment. If the limitations of what they achieved are clear to us today--we see it in perspective--they are limitations inevitably arising from the situation in which they found themselves, and it would be difficult to imagine that they could have accomplished more. If their influence on later developments at first glance seems slight, it must not be forgotten that these later developments would not have been conceivable had they not broken the ground. Surely many composers still active today remember with deep gratitude the loyal and generous encouragement and friendly advice and support received from them, as did this author from his former teachers, Edward B. Hill and Horatio Parker, and from older colleagues like Arthur Whiting, Arthur Foote, and Charles Martin Loeffler--men and musicians of considerable stature whose achievements were significant and who worked under conditions incomparably less favorable than those of recent date.