On 14 January 1914 the Société musicale indépendente (SMI) mounted what Satie described as ‘un grandissime concert’; Ravel called it ‘a stupendous project for a scandalous concert’. Why did it seem so daring even to those participating in it? The concert included high-profile premieres by Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel and Maurice Delage. Two of these works were inspired by another that was planned for this concert but did not make it onto the programme, Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire. Other composers were included in this extraordinary programme, most notably Florent Schmitt and Erik Satie; the latter had recently been rediscovered by Claude Debussy and Ravel, and credited with initiating the whole debussyste musical revolution. It was a rare moment of aesthetic unity that crossed national boundaries. The programme was but one of the series of concerts given by the still-new SMI, which brought together compatible but independent modernist traditions from across Europe, placing Paris at the centre for experimentation in sonority and form.

The unity was not to last: the period from 1914 until the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 saw a fracturing of artistic accords between most of the composers mentioned above. Satie rebelled, the war intervened, Debussy died and music in Paris was never quite the same. Roland-Manuel, writing in 1925 about the perceived gap between generations, attempted to explain: