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Chapter 1 begins with a primal myth transposed to the city. William Wordsworth’s ‘Power of Music’ represents street music as an unqualified blessing: in proclaiming his fiddler ‘An Orpheus!’, the poet summons the miraculous and sacred power of music and song, but any allusion to Orpheus is shadowed by his tragic fate. Wordsworth’s poem recalls, by inversion, William Hogarth’s famous print, ‘The Enrag’d Musician’ (1741), in which a mob of urban noise-makers (including rival and degraded forms of street music and song) advance on the ‘classical’ violinist, himself a bathetic version of divine harmony. Hogarth’s urban ‘soundscape’ reappears in James Clarence Mangan’s poem ‘Khidder’ (1845), which likewise brings the fate of Orpheus, rather than his power, into focus. The violence with which street singers are faced is evident in George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889), whose title indicates that Orpheus will descend in vain into the hell of the city.

This chapter is an application of grading fundamentals to the ensemble music setting. Music grades have evolved to include many conventions that do not conform to the advice of many grading experts. Grades determined by student achievement with respect to foundational understandings and abilities, rather than concert music performance, are often the fairest and most educational. Areas of particular concern for music grades include home practice time, concert and rehearsal attendance, class participation, and extra credit. These and other issues are elucidated. Recommendations for educative music grades are included throughout.

Much sooner than Berlioz had predicted, the workers’ chorus founded a year earlier has given its first concert. In reviewing it, he falls into some of the quasi-religious rhetoric of the proto-socialist Saint-Simonians, with whom he has sympathized. We learn that Mainzer’s chorus forms only one of several parts of the curriculum offered to workmen through the Polytechnical Association: there are classes in geometry, arithmetic, drawing, and other subjects. Music was added as a form of moral instruction: it was decided that the best way of directing popular education toward the Good was to cultivate an “artistic sensibility.” Berlioz’s generous critique of the choral concert resonates with his own deeply held belief in the civilizing power of music, a belief touchingly confirmed by the workers’ serenade for their choir director in the aftermath of the concert.

Although it experienced moderate growth, by the early 1990s the church was in disarray and nearly collapsed after the death of Ben Klassen in 1993. This chapter covers these events. In the final years of his life, Klassen looked in earnest for a successor to replace him as Pontifex Maximus, the title he created to signify the leader of his church. His personal wealth attracted a number of unscrupulous individuals, who caused considerable dissension in the church. After many failures, Klassen thought he had found a suitable successor in Dr. Rick McCarty, a psychologist who practiced in Florida. Later, McCarty also faced mounting troubles aside from the death of Klassen. With Klassen's demise, the church entered a phase of rapid decline. However, a young Canadian would spread the message of Creativity to skinheads through the emerging genre of “white power” music.

Berlioz’s dreams of making music on a grand scale, as in the great festivals of the Revolution of 1789, faced one great obstacle: the institutions undergirding those festivals, notably the church choir schools, had vanished. Yet the recent decree of universal primary-school education, and initiatives for military music and workers’ education, stirred his hopes. Before evoking visions of the future, he gives a wide-ranging analysis of the “barbarous” state of music as currently practiced. He then turns to the two impressive initiatives that occasion this article: the workers’ chorus founded by Mainzer; the efforts initiated by Aubéry du Boulley for musical education and performances in the provinces. There is a ring of Saint-Simonian fervor in the final call for a “great and beautiful revolution in our culture,” a call to educate the masses for the benefit of humanity and Berlioz’s own cherished art.