Holy Week, they played Carissimi, Schuetz, and the Italian and German
masters of the seventeenth century. Then came Bach's cantatas; and their
performance, given by M. Bordes in the Salle d'Harcourt, attracted large
audiences and started the cult of this master in Paris. Then they sang
Rameau and Gluck; and, finally, all ancient music, sacred or secular,
was approved. And so this little school, which had been consecrated to
the cult of ancient religious music, and had made so modest a
beginning,[229] developed into a School of Art capable of satisfying
modern wants; and in 1900, when M. Vincent d'Indy became president of
the _Schola_, it was decided to move the school into larger premises in
the Rue Saint-Jacques.

The programme of this new school was explained by M. Vincent d'Indy in
his Inauguration speech on 2 November, 1900, and showed how he based the
foundations of musical teaching upon history.

"Art, in its journey across the ages, is a microcosm which has,
like the world itself, successive stages of youth, maturity, and
old age; but it never dies--it renews itself perpetually. It is not
like a perfect circle; it is like a spiral, and in its growth is
always mounting higher. I believe in making students follow the
same path that art itself has followed, so that they shall undergo
during their term of study the same transformations that music
itself has undergone during the centuries. In this way they will
come out much better armed for the difficulties of modern art,
since they will have lived, so to speak, the life of art, and
followed the natural and inevitable order of the forms that made up
the different epochs of artistic development."

[Footnote 229: When Charles Bordes opened the first _Schola Cantorum_ in
the Rue Stanislas he was without help or resources, and had exactly
thirty-seven francs and fifty centimes in hand. I mention this detail to
give an idea of the splendidly courageous and confident spirit that
Charles Bordes possessed.]

M. d'Indy claims that this system may be applied as successfully to
instrumentalists and singers as to future composers. "For it is as
profitable for them to know," he says, "how to sing a liturgic monody
properly, or to be able to play a Corelli sonata in a suitable style, as
it is for composers to study the structure of a motet or a suite." M.
d'Indy, moreover, obliged all students, without distinction, t