It is a fine notion: Make live music available, at no charge, on a given night every year. Taking it to the masses, that is.

I first encountered the results of that notion in Paris a decade or so ago, and it was reprised tonight across France, including in our little Languedocienne town.

In France, La Fete de la Musique brings people outside every June 21, and that was how it worked here, too, on what often is the first day of summer.

The first musician to perform was a man from the local “big city” (population, 7,000), whose genre is “classical Spanish guitar”.

He set up a stage in the town church, opened in 1703, which has nice acoustics and provides overhead cover — in this case, from the sun, still intense at 7 p.m.

The stage focused on a chair just ahead of a semi-circle of reflective glass, shaped to lean over the musician, which no doubt helped project the guitar’s sounds towards the back of the church, where nearly 100 people had gathered.

The guitarist was earnest, and polite, but seemed to stumble more than a few times through a half-dozen pieces, which made me ponder on the difficulty of picking out tunes on a six-string guitar, rather than just strumming three chords — which many of us can do.

Also, it was difficult to detect tunes in his work, which may simply be a function of Spanish guitar when it mostly is providing background sound.

But, too, I had arrived with the idea that he might at least one of the acoustical guitar standards, perhaps even a solo version of Classical Gas, released in 1968 by Mason Williams — which ranks among the great classical guitar achievements of the past 50 years. (Here is the better-known version of the piece, with a band backing the performer.)

Williams in his recording also demonstrates that a fingering-heavy tune does not have to include lots of squeaking.

After 45 minutes, our guy wrapped up his work, and everyone applauded, and the crowd emptied into the square, where a cooking fire made of vine branches was already blazing.

Some of us sat on the terrace of the town’s one restaurant and ordered pizza and drank rose wine or beer, and others set up tables nearer the fountain, the epicenter of the square, and appreciated the musical stylings of a three-kid band, which covered a batch of recent pop work and was well-received.

The performance was made more personal by the knowledge that two of the three members of the band are brothers (lead singer and drummer), sons of the first American to live in the town full-time.

The light lingered deep into the night, which is how it works in France, in the summer, and conversations among seven anglophones moved up and down the table while the French townspeople waited patiently for the sausages and baguettes that made up their dinner.

The first Fete I enjoyed included an orchestral concert at the prime minister’s mansion in Paris, in the garden. We later moseyed over to Invalides, where a band was playing on the other side of the trench that surrounds the old military hospital. For the past few decades, at least one all-night concert (11 p.m. to 7 a.m.) in Paris has been a Fete standard.

It was a fine night, as June 21 generally is, in France, and the notion of free concerts available in every town across the country … well, it seems an idea that should have crossed the Atlantic by now.