Thus, looking back at the conditions prevailing around 1910, our decision of that year to become a composer seems reckless almost to the point of madness. We cannot, of course, conceive of any other we could have made. Today, however, the young musician, including the composer, faces quite a different situation. If he wishes really to work and to produce even on the most artistic level, he can find much in his surroundings to encourage him. In the important centers he can find musicians capable of advising him; and in several of the large cities throughout the country he can acquire the instruction he needs. Today a composer has a fair possibility to gain at least a local hearing, and his music will be listened to with attention and interest by an appreciable number of listeners. With slight reservations it may be said that it is no longer necessary for a young American musician to leave his country in order to find adequate instruction and a more intense musical life. (The reservations concern such special fields as the opera, in which a degree of European experience is vital due to conditions prevalent in that field.) It is not necessary for him to go to Europe to find more severe criteria, more competent teachers or more sympathetic colleagues, or to find the opportunity to become acquainted with first-class musicians of an older generation. In the United States he finds a complex and developed music life. The contrast with conditions of forty or fifty years ago is indeed noteworthy. This book deals with that development, with the questions it raises and the problems it involves. Above all, this development is interesting from the point of view of the subject itself--American music within the total picture of music today. It is fascinating also from another point of view: various forces have contributed to this development--historical, social, and economic forces--and action and effect raise, in one more guise, questions vital to the understanding of the world today and the state of contemporary culture both in the United States and elsewhere. In a summary discussion such as the present, many such questions--regarding the future of art and of culture itself, the nature and prospects of art in a democratic society, the fate of the individual today--will of necessity remain virtually untouched. They are, nevertheless, present by implication. For the individual artist whose one earnest preoccupation is his own production, the answers to these questions, as far as he is at all concerned with them, lie in the realm of faith and premise rather than in theoretical discussion. Whatever he accomplishes will in its own measure be a witness and justification of that faith, whether or not he is aware of it. A cultural movement of any kind is not to be judged in theoretical terms, but in those of authentic achievement.