This movement with regard to musical study grew rapidly; and the first International Congress of Music, held in Paris at the time of the Universal Exhibition of 1900, gave historians of music an opportunity of realising their influence.  In a few years, teaching about music was to be had everywhere.  At first there were the free lectures of M. Lionel Dauriac and M. Georges Houdard at the Sorbonne, those of MM.  Aubry, Gastoue, Pirro, and Vincent d’Indy at the Schola and the Institut Catholique; and then, at the beginning of 1902, there was the little Faculty of Music of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes sociales, making a centre for the efforts of French scholars of music; and, in 1900, two official courses of lectures on Musical History and Aesthetics were given at the College de France and the Sorbonne.

The progress of musical criticism was just as rapid.  Professors of faculties, old pupils of the Ecole Normale Superieure, or the Ecole des Chartes, such as Henri Lichtenberger, Louis Laloy, and Pierre Aubrey, examined works of the past, and even of the present, by the exact methods of historical criticism.  Choir-masters and organists of great erudition, such as Andre Pirro and Gastoue, and composers like Vincent d’Indy, Dukas, Debussy, and some others, analysed their art with the confidence that the intimate knowledge of its practice brings.  A perfect efflorescence of works on music appeared.  A galaxy of distinguished writers and a public were found to support two separate collections of Biographies of Musicians (which were issued at the same time by different publishers), as well as five or six good musical journals of a scientific character, some of which rivalled the best in Germany.  And, finally, the French section of the Societe Internationale de Musique, which was founded in 1899 in Berlin to establish communication between the scholars of all countries, found so favourable a ground with us that the number of its adherents in Paris alone is now over one hundred.

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6. Music and the People

Thus music had almost come back to its own, as far as the higher kind of teaching and the intellectual world were concerned.  It remained for a place to be found for it in other kinds of teaching; for there, and especially in secondary education, its advance was less sure.  It remained for us to make it enter into the life of the nation and into the people’s education.  This was a difficult task, for in France art has always had an aristocratic character; and it was a task in which neither the State nor musicians were very interested.  The Republic still continued to regard music as something outside the people.  There had even been opposition shown during the last thirty years towards any attempt at popular musical education.  In the old days of the Pasdeloup concerts one could pay seventy-five centimes for the cheapest places, and have a seat for that; but at some of the symphony concerts to-day the cheapest seats are two and four francs.  And so the people that sometimes came to the Pasdeloup concerts never come at all to the big concerts to-day.