I returned to Paris and proceeded to make all necessary arrangements for the examinations of the two hundred bandmasters. Our army had leased a large hotel near the Bastille on the banks of the Seine, and a large room on the ground floor served admirably for my purpose. The band of the 329th infantry soon arrived and was quartered in this hotel, and every morning at 9.30 the examinations began and continued from Monday to Thursday at the rate of about fifty bandmasters a week, who arrived from all quarters of France—from the seaport towns, from the training camps, and some even from the very front line of the trenches. Fridays I would usually return to headquarters and report on my findings and begin recommendations, which gradually assumed greater and greater proportions as the magnitude of the work developed.
To assist me in this prodigious work, I engaged the services of M. Francis Casadesus, brother of Henri and a splendid musician. He examined the men as to their qualifications in instrumentation and in their general knowledge of the various instruments, while I examined them in the actual process of conducting and drilling a band. I would first let them bite their teeth into an overture like the “Oberon” of Weber, or a movement from a classical symphony, and then would let them conduct a composition of their own choice. I found very soon that while most of these young bandmasters were musically talented and ambitious, they had had no or but little opportunity for acquiring what we may call the technic of the baton. They had had no intensive disciplinary training such as our young officers from civilian life had received at Plattsburg and similar camps. Many of them did not know how to beat time properly, much less train a band in phrasing or rhythmic accuracy; and I soon saw that unless some opportunity was given them to learn at least the rudiments of their calling, the effort toward improving our bands would be useless. It therefore seemed to me that the quick formation of a bandmasters’ school was the only solution of the problem, and as our army had had the help of French military and aviation officers as instructors, loaned to us by the Ministère de la Guerre, I thought that a similar arrangement could be made, under which we might obtain the necessary musical instructors also from the French army, as nearly all the musicians of France were at that time in uniform.
I also discovered that some of the most important musical instruments which give mellowness and nobility to the tone of a band were almost utterly lacking. We had hardly any oboes, bassoons, French horns, or flügelhorns. I knew that some of the greatest masters of these instruments, first prizes of the Conservatoire of Paris, were serving in the French army, and immediately, through the Ministère des Beaux Arts, obtained their names and the regiments to which they belonged. On the following visit to Chaumont I proposed to General Pershing that we form a music-school at which fifty bandmasters could get the most intensive musical training and discipline for eight weeks, to be succeeded by a new batch of fifty, etc., and at the same time forty pupils each in oboe, bassoon, French horn, and flügelhorn could get a similar training of twelve weeks on their respective instruments.
General Pershing and his staff were delighted with the plan and I offered to procure the necessary instructors from the French army, promising General Pershing that the school would be in complete running order by October 1, provided a proper building could be obtained. The general asked me where I wished to place the school and offered me Longres, where several schools on the strategy of war were already in progress, but I claimed that the surroundings for my music-school should be of a more “peaceful and even academic character,” and suggested Chaumont. General Pershing smiled, but insisted that it was already overcrowded and that I would not be able to find a building large enough to house so great a number of instructors and pupils. He gave me full power, however, to see what could be done, and I set forth immediately with a French liaison officer—member of the French Military Commission at Chaumont, and in G-5, general headquarters, under which department the proposed music-school would come—who proved a most remarkable and valuable assistant in my work. He was Lieutenant Michel Weill, nephew of the owner of the well-known White House in San Francisco, and an enthusiastic musical amateur who, through his long residence in America, had acquired a knowledge of English and a sympathy for America only second to that for his own native land. He belonged to a delightful French officers’ mess at Chaumont, and they immediately made me a kind of honorary member and in most hospitable fashion invited me to their Lucullan repasts. As they were all enthusiastic lovers of music, I endeavored to repay them by pounding out Wagner, their supreme favorite, to their hearts’ content on an old upright piano placed in a little sitting-room next to their salle à manger.
Lieutenant Weill and I first paid a visite de cérémonie to the Maire of Chaumont and explained to him our desire. The idea of what he called “un petit conservatoire de musique pour les Américains” in Chaumont appealed to his fancy immensely, and he immediately picked up his telephone and called up an old friend of his, a fellow citizen and mill owner. He explained to him the great honor that was about to befall their town if a proper building could be found, and exhorted him to show himself as a really patriotic citizen of France and friend of the Americans by giving the mill which he owned just outside the city and only a few minutes’ walk from our headquarters for this noble purpose. We motored to this building and met there an elderly, dignified, and courteous Frenchman who told us that anything he had was at the disposal of “les Américains.” We found a huge mill with walls two feet thick, the machinery in disuse, and with large empty spaces that our army engineers could easily turn into sleeping-quarters, practising-rooms, and other needs for a music-school. In one large wing we found a few women and many children playing about. I said: “Of course, we shall need this wing also.” “Then I regret,” answered the owner, “but this wing you cannot have, because I have given it to forty-eight refugees from Verdun with the promise that they shall occupy it until the end of the war.” Naturally Lieutenant Weill and I reconsidered, and concluded that a large tent could be put up in the meadow as an eating-place, and that we could get along without the extra wing. I then asked the owner what rental he would demand. “Oh,” he said, “anything that the American army wishes to pay.” But when Lieutenant Weill informed him that he should fix a fair price, he asked timidly: “Would the American army consider five hundred francs a month reasonable?” I tell this to offset the tales of those people who keep harping on the commercial greed of the French in anything that concerned the needs of the American soldier.
We returned to general headquarters jubilant, and, after a satisfactory interview with the officer in charge of building operations, it was decided to place the school in Chaumont, and I returned to Paris to complete my plans.
My brother Frank had recognized the lack of good schooling for our army bands and bandmasters many years before the war, and had very patriotically placed the entire machinery of his Institute of Musical Art at the disposal of the secretary of war. An arrangement had accordingly been made by which a bandmaster’s school at Governor’s Island, New York, was placed under my brother’s control, and for several years before the war a small number of bandmasters were graduated from it who ranked well on a par with those of other countries. But when we entered the war and our army was organized on a scale of millions these were but a drop in the bucket, and heroic measures were necessary to bring some semblance of order into this musical chaos of hundreds of uneducated bandmasters and thousands of still less educated bandsmen.
During these five weeks in Paris and Chaumont I worked very hard and, while my life has been crowded with affairs of all kinds relating to my profession, I cannot recall any time when the work was so constant day and night or when I was more jubilantly happy in the doing of it. During the forenoons Casadesus and I would examine the bandmasters, discover what they could and could not do, give them, so to speak, “first aid to the wounded” by pointing out their worst failings or their greatest weaknesses. In the afternoons Lieutenant Weill and I would run around to the various French government departments on the track of this or that musician whom we wished to corral as professor for our school. At night I would sit propped up in bed and work out the entire tuition plan of the school, down to the minutest details.
My general recommendations to general headquarters, all of which were subsequently carried out, included classes for the bandmasters’ instruction in the technic of conducting, in harmony, and in orchestration. These classes were put in charge of M. Francis Casadesus and M. André Caplet. The latter was later on succeeded by Lieutenant Albert Stoessel, a highly talented bandmaster in our army, who has returned to civilian life and has now become my successor as conductor of the New York Oratorio Society.
Captain Ellacott, of the A. E. F., became the military head of the school to which he gave most sympathetic assistance.