1930 was, perhaps, a low point in the history of music in Canada. The economic conditions were not entirely to blame; they just administered the coup de grâce. The flourishing life of the nineteenth century, mostly visible in the two major cities, Toronto and Montreal, was first brought low by World War I; and conditions after the war militated against a full revival. Much of that flourishing life was amateur (if you wanted music you had to make it yourself); musical accomplishment was a social rather than a professional asset, and professional music was mainly in the hands of touring artists or immigrants, although Montreal's French community had a number of native professionals, reflecting a longer tradition and a different attitude to the arts. The means of livelihood for the professional musician were mainly teaching and playing in theatre orchestras. In all parts of Canada the aristocrat of the professionals was the church organist, although he could not make a living from the church alone. The status that his position gave him meant that he was in demand as a teacher, sometimes in musical areas where he was least qualified. In some communities he was the only professional: not only was he organist and choirmaster, but he taught organ, piano, theory, and singing, he would be the logical conductor for the local operatic society (what would he have done without Gilbert and Sullivan?), and he was even expected to assemble the local worthies into a raggle-taggle amateur orchestra. In Anglophone Canada he was often an Englishman or a Scotsman (indeed, in one church, Metropolitan Methodist in Toronto, the organ endowment specified that the incumbent must have a music doctorate and be a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists, requirements which for many years precluded anyone other than a Britisher from holding the post).