Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/627

 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.