Why is it that the Italian composers who were born around 1880 did not continue the tradition of their immediate predecessors, but turned to other sources in search of a guiding star—to Gregorian plainchant, for example, to the madrigalists of the Renaissance, to the instrumental composers of the eighteenth century, even to contemporary Europe? It would take too long to go into the reasons here, but it is an undoubted fact that these composers are not so much sons of their fathers as of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and even, so to speak, of their non-Italian cousins; and the same may be said of the composers born at the beginning of this century, in whom the situation repeated itself, although in a somewhat modified form.