Lynne, you've written a fascinating essay. The evolution of the passive audience coupled with the movement toward "art as religion" has greatly broadened the gulf separating artist and viewers. And yet, as you question in your post, "Who cares whether the audience is "engaged" or not?" I believe the answer lies within the social nature of human beings. We are communal animals who cannot live in isolation. The impulse to create and share art is found deep within our genetic code. The arts serve a cohesive function within society, transmitting images and emotions that converge the commonalities of human nature. In the highest forms of artistic expression the artist and audience are joined in a symbiotic relationship, each reinforcing and uplifting the other.

What concerns me is all this talk about "market share" and "audience engagement". The arts have evolved into a complex industry in which the commercial and nonprofit sectors have formed an alliance with talent, product and capital flowing from one to the other. Can economic and aesthetic values coexist comfortably?

I entered musical life as a musician, and spent a decade and a half as a professional orchestra musician - okay, as a professional violist. I'll wait...

As I was saying, I spent more than a decade of my performing career in The North Carolina Symphony and during that time I shared a view with my colleagues that we, the musicians, were the orchestra, and they, the audience, were ...well, the audience. It was all happening on stage, and those few in the seats who really understood what was going on enjoyed a feast, or perhaps a clambake on a bad night, and the rest of the audience got something out of it I suppose, but I couldn't fathom what that might have been.

Then there came a point that I elected to undergo a conversion to management in lieu of neck surgery, and the scales, so to speak, fell from my eyes. I realized that we musicians were most emphatically not the orchestra. The orchestra was plainly those folks in city after town all around the state whose eyeglasses reflected stage light from the darkness of the house night after night. They were the orchestra. We - musicians, managers, stagehands, conductors - were the hired help. It sounds obvious or absurd, but I knew it to be the truth because I got a paycheck for showing up and performing or managing.

Why is this paradigm important? Because we are always talking about how we can sell what we have to them, but they are not them - they are more us than we ourselves.

I spent about a decade in orchestra management and so far a dozen years in development/ fundraising both as employee and consultant for orchestras, theaters, museums, universities, secondary schools, hospitals, associations, human services, churches, etc. After all of that, I am firmly convinced that my post-performer epiphany was accurate: they are the orchestra, not us.

I know I for sure lost at least one job interview several years ago the moment I said this. Our field looks for stars and strongmen (persons) to sell our art on the strength of charisma. But is that rational? Other nonprofits thrive by appealing to enduring values of community, the shared experience of growing together, shared conviction, recognition, personal validation, and even the desire for immortality (named a building lately?).

Our audience is our orchestra. It is our community, the Petri dish in which we grow our art. It is absurd to treat it like a bunch of commoditized consumers whose wants and needs we need to figure out so we can sell to them. They are our partners. Maybe they don't fully understand the product, but we can still treat them with respect and recognize that they are important, and it's not just their ticket money. If we can shake off our delusions we can build strong, productive relationships with them that will become a solid foundation for our art. How? It's late and I have to get some sleep. If anybody is interested I'll write more later.