Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)--Vincent d'Indy (1851-1931)--Paul
Dukas (1865-1935)--Guy Ropartz (1864)--Florent Schmitt
(1870)--Charles Marie Widor (1865-1937)--Louis Vierne
(1870-1937) -- Albéric Magnard (1865-1914) -- Gabriel
Fauré (1845-1924)--Charles Koechlin (1865-1950)--Roger-
Ducasse (1873)--Déodat Séverac (1877-
1921)--Louis Aubert (1877)--Gustave
Charpentier (1860)

A LTHOUGH the history of music has shown a constant but gradual
change from period to period, the cleavage between old and established
traditional customs has never been so suddenly marked as in the twen-
tieth century. In the 1920's there appeared a complete break and
negation of everything which had come to be regarded as permanent
ideals undergoing, nevertheless, smooth expansion. This period, and
this sudden break, are unparalleled in earlier years; in the same way
that it was a French composer, Hector Berlioz ( 1803-1869), who carried
music on from the pleasantries of Haydn and Mozart to the Symphonie
fantastique, written only twenty years after Haydn's death, so the
new avant-garde of music in the present century may be said to have
been declared in France. The difference between the composers who
were actually making themselves felt in the early years of the century
and their immediate predecessors of the late nineteenth is one of the
phenomena of musical history; so much the greater the split in the
1920's. French music led European thought in some respects for a
greater part of the nineteenth century, and when it was not actually in
front of the German ideal, it ran parallel with it. By the end of the
nineteenth century France had produced a line of symphonic composers
in Franck, Lalo, Saint-Saëns, Chausson and Dukas, whose approach
differed from the contemporary German and Austrian schools only in
their attraction to a less thoroughly technical aesthetic. The technically

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