CHAPTER XXXVII
MUSICAL EDUCATION AND LITERATURE
225. The Conservatories.—The middle of the 19th century
was the time when music-teaching became a notable profession
for a multitude of musicians, sometimes working independently,
sometimes banded together in institutions, sometimes holding
official positions at courts or in theatres, opera-houses, churches,
etc. To be a musician has almost always been to be a music-teacher,
but musical pedagogy now became a well-recognized
vocation, with methods reduced to some system and with constantly
improving apparatus.
It is not always remembered how peculiarly dependent music is for
propagation upon the mediation of the living teacher or illustrator, impressing
himself either privately, in the class-room, or in public performance.
The products of musical art cannot be displayed as objects in
a museum. It is true that they can be circulated in printed form. But
this latter approach is effective only when the user's mind has been
prepared by special study under teachers. It is true, also, that a
knowledge of music is diffused through concerts, the opera, church
services and the like, reaching people somewhat en masse; but such
renditions involve the action of living exponents, and their full impression
is dependent upon some amount of personal study. It is for reasons
like these that there has arisen such a prodigious demand for instructors in
every branch of music—a demand which must increase in geometrical
ratio as it is successfully met.
The success of the Paris Conservatoire (from 1795), combined
with the growth of interest in organized education, led throughout
the early and middle 19th century to the foundation of
many other institutions, larger or smaller, designed as technical
music-schools. The main object of the Paris institution was to
supply dramatic composers and singers. The object of some
other schools was like that of the earliest Italian conservatories—to
study Plain-Song and the vocal polyphony required in
church services. The object of the Leipsic conservatory (from
1843) was to further instrumental composition and performance.
