Those who live on the outskirts of the world of music may say that they cannot get as much of it as they desire; those who are in the midst of it are painfully aware that they cannot escape the overwhelming flood. The commercialization of music has led to overproduction. This is apparent enough in England, where commercialization has fostered the spawning of a thoroughly degraded type; in Germany the over-production has been a greater danger because the vast complexity of the musical industry has encouraged respectable mediocrity. It is not to be wondered that plenty of musicians would be glad to make a clean sweep of all the music of the past and start fresh from the beginning. We cannot; it is a hopeless delusion. Even if we could make the clean sweep, we are still men of the twentieth century; we cannot return, for just one aspect of our lives and that perhaps the most direct and immediate, to primitive savagery. Civilization has forced us to remember what we ought in the nature of things to have forgotten. Commercialism has always been only too glad to throw dust in our eyes with the pretence of culture. We tell people that they ought to know and love their musical classics. Being out of copyright, they can be reprinted cheaply. Teachers find it least troublesome to teach what they have always taught; concert-givers play what they have always played――it is the safest thing and requires the least rehearsal and study. The casual listener loves the “dear familiar strain.” It is not as if people knew their classics intimately in a scholarly way. And the scholar is easily tempted into false judgments under the itch for research. Old music has its interest for the musical anatomist, but from an artistic point of view most of it is much better forgotten.