When Chadwick returned from his one-year-trip to Europe he was happy to come back to the New England Conservatory. The school now was housed comfortably in its new building on Huntington Avenue, with the new “Jordan Hall” and the new organ. Among the board of trustees, presided over by Jordan, Jr., were Henry Lee Higginson, who had been a trustee since 1891, and also Chadwick's longtime friend Charles G. Saunders, at that date an influential lawyer and businessman, who had joined the board in 1902.

In 1906, Chadwick was elected to the prestigious Thursday Evening Club, which by then was about 50 years old and considered the “most Bostonese of Boston institutions,” into which one could only be invited. The members consisted of many Harvard people and “well-to-do citizens.” Chadwick made his speaking debut at the symposium-like meetings by presenting a paper, “The Evolution of the Musical Idea” on 19 March 1908, as he noted in the typescript. In this speech, he emphasized that melody was the principal quality of music; it emanated from the premise that “the musical idea is the conception of beauty through sound.” The close correspondence of Chadwick's thinking to the aesthetics of German romanticism, propagated prominently by John Sullivan Dwight and Lowell Mason in America, becomes clarion, when Chadwick concludes his thoughts with the assertion that good music excels in the capacity to “elevate and console mankind.” In a different context, reflecting on the duties and responsibilities of a “school of music,” he widened his view by recommending a “school for listeners” in order to advocate “the art of music in this country,” by votaries with a “hearing ear and an understanding heart.”

In 1907, the 53-year-old Chadwick had completed ten years as director of the conservatory. He had initiated many reforms, trying to organize the curriculum “as near as possible on the university basis.” The school was financially consolidated, the economic problems which Chadwick had had to face at the beginning of his directorship nearly overcome. He personally took care of the orchestra, which he defined as the “great effective engine for the musical advancement of the school.”