Second--and one may regard this point as controversial: the influence Arnold Schönberg exerted during his lifetime in the United States, that is, for nearly twenty years, is most noteworthy. Like many refugees from Europe, he became a passionately enthusiastic citizen of our country and here composed some of his most important works, possibly the most important: the Fourth Quartet, the Violin Concerto, the String Trio, and others. Though his career as such may not be relevant to our present discussion, it is appropriate to stress the influence of this great personality on American music life--an influence which has been deeper than is generally assumed. It has always been in the direction of intensified awareness of that “great line” to which reference was made, and in the sense of that great line. From his pupils in this country, as from those he had had previously in Europe, he demanded, first and above all, striving toward such awareness. Though he discovered the _twelve-tone_ method, he was far greater than this or any other method, and he tried to inculcate upon his students and disciples an awareness of the primacy of music itself: thus he refused to teach the method to his students, insisting that they must come to it naturally and as a result of their own creative requirements, or not at all. The _twelve-tone_ music has flourished here as elsewhere, and is no longer problematical. This author, often identified with the _twelve-tone_ or _dodecaphonic_ tendency, recently read an article, as yet unpublished, on his music in which it was pointed out that several of his colleagues, Walter Piston, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland, actually experimented with the method before he himself used it in any literal sense, and this in spite of the fact that these colleagues are considered as belonging to a different camp. The fact is one more proof that the “system” no longer is an issue. The issue, rather, is one of the resources of a composer, while the system is available for use by any individual and in any way he sees fit. The arguments which loom ahead and already have begun to resound in Europe, are most likely those between composers who commit themselves to the “system” as conceived by them, the “system” as a value in itself, and those who regard it as a tool to be used in the forging of music valid on quite different and perennially vital grounds. The attitude of Schönberg, and for that matter and in equal measure of his followers Alban Berg and Anton Webern, is appropriately summarized in a sentence Schönberg once quoted in a letter to this author, and which is drawn from one of his early lectures. “A Chinese philosopher,” Schönberg wrote, “speaks Chinese, of course; but the important thing is: what does he say?”