was little sustained demand for either. In the whole of the first decade of the chair's existence only three students obtained a degree in music and twenty-three acquired a diploma. Moreover, Marshall-Hall complained that he had no control over the practical work of diploma students, as apart from himself the university employed no music staff, which meant that students had to take private lessons from teachers of their choice in the external community. To overcome this problem and increase enrolments Marshall-Hall called for the establishment of a university conservatorium, and on 19 July 1894, legislation was passed to create the first conservatorium in the British Empire within a university. With the professor as ex-officio director it opened for business in 1895, renting premises initially in the unfinished Queen's Coffee Palace on the corner of Rathdowne and Victoria streets, Carlton, but moving soon afterwards to the ground-floor of the Victorian Artists' Society building in East Melbourne. From the beginning enrolments boomed. In the meantime, George Marshall-Hall was also making his mark on the broader musical community outside the university. He established a largely professional orchestra which, after an initial public performance toward the end of 1891, began in the following year to give an annual series of concerts, mostly on Saturday afternoons under the professor's conductorship in the Melbourne Town Hall. When the last one had been performed in 1911, a total of 111 such concerts had been given – an average of more than five a year. In addition, from 1897 to 1902 he acted as honorary conductor of the Melbourne Liedertafel, a male choir. And all the time he continued to compose music, including a concert overture in G minor, an Idyll, a symphony in E-flat, incidental music for a performance of Euripides' Alcestis, a string quartet in D minor, a dramatic ballad based on Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci, a study on Tennyson's "Maud", a Capriccio for violin and orchestra, a choral ode, a music drama called Aristodemus and two operas. Most of these works were performed in Melbourne under his direction. Controversialist He also found time to publish numerous newspaper articles, four books of verse and a play called Bianca Capello, as well as delivering many passionate and provocative speeches in the concert-hall and elsewhere which were widely reported in the press. Among other things, he preached a whole-hearted, sensuous enjoyment of living, extolling "the mighty