This is not to minimize the fact that jazz developed via American popular music, and that it contains a strong primitive ingredient from this source. However, other elements were added, as it were, by accretion, elements which derive from a predominantly rhythmic vitality and are supposedly inherited from the African past of the negroes. Long before the name jazz was given to this type of music, its rhythmical and colorist, and to a degree its melodic elements had attracted the attention of European musicians. Beginning as early as Debussy’s _Golliwogg’s Cake Walk_, one remembers a series of works by Stravinsky, Casella, Milhaud, Weill, and others. The influence remained active for a short time, and by the end of the thirties it had virtually disappeared. Similar things happened in the United States, yet with far-reaching implications. Certain composers had hoped to find in jazz the basis for an “American” style and their efforts may be considered the most serious of all ever made to create an American music with “popular style” as its foundation (even though jazz can really not be called folk music in the accepted sense of the word). These composers in jazz saw characteristic elements which they believed rich enough to allow development into a musical vocabulary, one of definite character, though limited to certain emotive characteristics in turn believed to be typically American. Aaron Copland in his _Music for the Theatre_ and his Piano Concerto (written in 1926) showed his audience novel points of departure such as had been suggested by Europeans; other Americans felt capable of carrying these beginnings still farther and discovered idiomatic features not only in the musical vocabulary, but in the American personality as well.