Music was introduced at the Sorbonne by some young professors, who made
the subject the theses for their doctor's degree.[239]

[Footnote 239: The first three theses on Music accepted at the Sorbonne
were those of M. Jules Combarieu on _The Relationship of Poetry and
Music_, of M. Romain Holland on _The Beginnings of Opera before Lully
and Scarlatti_, and of M. Maurice Emmanuel on _Greek Orchestics_. There
followed, several years afterwards, M. Louis Laloy's _Aristoxenus of
Tarento and Greek Music_ and M. Jules Ecorcheville's _Musical
Aesthetics, from Lully to Rameau_ and _French Instrumental Music of the
Seventeenth Century_, M. Andre Pirro's _Aesthetics of Johann Sebastian
Bach_, and M. Charles Lalo's _Sketch of Scientific Musical
Aesthetics_.]

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