_The emotional age._ For the present purpose we may think of youth as represented by the age of the teens, usually beginning in the high school. It is a brief period of storm and stress, emotional awakening and emotional struggles, in which the various emotional drives, more or less latent before, assert themselves, often to cool off or to be attenuated in later life. The older psychologists spoke of it as a period of rebirth, the passing from the period of protected and directed life into the emergence of a self-asserting personality. At the time of this awakening, life is largely emotional; it is the period of ardent love, of social awakening, of sports and play of all kinds, of fortes and faults, of artistic efforts, of devotion to ideals, of awakening and emergence of controlled imagination, of the development of the great enthusiasms for life. Poetry, conversation, dancing, heroic stunts, emotional adventures of all kinds have their fling. This emotional tendency finds its expression in the language of emotion, of which music is one. _The age of serious play._ Youth is the age of serious play. Before this period the child has spontaneously played much and hard enough, but now youth enters into specialized sports, finds a play outlet in one or more of the arts, and with the play attitude takes up serious roles in social responsibilities. All these are comparatively new and are, therefore, entered on with fresh enthusiasm. Emotion has a way of burning itself up. Toward the end of the college course, youth, having had its fling, feels fed up on sports and after that may not even sit on the bleachers or the side lines. The same is true of many of the artistic outlets. When youth comes of age, the ventures into poetry, music, dramatics, and various other forms of art cool off for the majority. This loss of interest is especially noticeable in the social activities, in which the vocal arts, the dance, and other instruments of wooing play so large a role. It should, however, be said that the better our education, home life, and vocational activities are organized for right living, the less is the break at the beginning of this period of youth, as well as at the end. _The age of decision and eliminations._ The persons exceptionally gifted in music are precocious in that their artistic awakening comes earlier, and yet the real assertion and the serious functioning of their musical inspirations appear most characteristically and pass through their crucial period in the teens, after which large numbers of those who have gone through the fire of struggle for survival and mastery pass out of the picture.