Aren't the concepts "building participation" and "engaging" audiences ultimately the same thing. How can you build participation if you don't engage? And how to you engage if people aren't participating? Obviously, hospitals are about the health of patients. Healthy hospitals create healthy patients. So where are we supposedly going here?

I don't find very much new in this blog. The value of orchestras and operas were already being seriously questiond (and seen as outdated) by the 1930s and even earlier. During the 60s composers looked for entirely new paradigms for composer/performer/public relationships. Boulez even stated rather seriously that an elegant solution would be to blow up all of the opera houses. Concepts such as "Happenings" and Pauline Oliveros' "Deep Listening" are just of couple examples the innovations that were created. During the 80s postmodern theory again redefined creator/audience relations. The hierarchies between classical and popular music were questioned, and academic music was thrown into a bad light (finally.) We ended up with "Downtown Lite" and a lot of suburban neo-romantic composers "engaging audiences."

Spin your wheels. In the end, the solutions will always come back to education and funding. As we see in the rest of the entire industrial world, both are best solved by governments, and usually on a municipal and regional level. Of course, the last people to acknowledge this will be those who have built specialized careers dealing with foundations, trust funds, corporations, and the rich. Genuine progress toward public funding would weaken their position and status in society by making them less relevant. Conferences such as the one in Nashville are thus often studies in denial about America's extremist and isolated form of funding. They can't admit the problems are systemic.

William Osborne
www.osborne-conant.org