Changes in compositional technique and choice of subject matter in contemporary music at the turn of the century led a broad range of Austro-German critics, scholars, and composers to conclude that it had been pushed into a state of degeneration, or Entartung, a concept derived from contemporary medical theory. Degeneracy was attributed to the negative physical and psychological effects of modern industrialized society on the individual. Exposure to urban noise and pollution, for example, was linked to nervousness. Critics argued that modernity was having a similar effect on contemporary music. This situation could be remedied, however, if composers reformed the language of musical modernism with stylistic traits derived from Baroque and Classical music. This idea had a profound influence on several composers who reached artistic maturity in Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic. This was certainly the case with Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, and Kurt Weill, the leading composers of the post-1918 generation. After a brief period of stylistic experimentation that ended around 1923, this trio consolidated the Neoclassical idiom that distinguishes their music written during the Weimar era. Hindemith, Krenek, and Weill did not engage in pastiche or epigonism. Their selective appropriation of Baroque and Classical models was motivated instead by a desire to counter the degeneracy that had been associated with musical modernism since the turn of the century. Ultimately, these three composers were looking to the past in order to insure the viability of contemporary music.