During those same fifteen years, my work in the support and development sphere of the American opera world kept me involved with the stubborn search for a here-and-now repertory. Creative renewal, it seemed to me, was necessary for continuance in any artform, and creative renewal in an idiom recognizably American particularly necessary for operatic continuance in our vast land, politically independent and innovative, but operatically still a colony. That would have to mean works of both the artistic stature and audience appeal (“repeatable and renewable,” I like to say) to plausibly assume positions alongside at least the run-of-show operas, if not the supreme masterpieces, of the established repertory, making effective use of the musical and theatrical resources of the institutions designed for performance of that repertory. And/or: works of similar stature and appeal but of a newly imagined kind, possibly incorporating other musical and theatrical means, to be performed outside those institutions and not thought of, yet or perhaps ever, as belonging to a repertory. We had made a promising beginning, I thought, on an oeuvre of the first type with the Little Canon. But I told myself (and such was the temper of the times in my field of play) that it was important to remain open to the second, too.

The stubborn search for creative renewal was by no means the sole objective of the development initiatives I was a part of. But it was an element in the broader effort to expand opera in America, to give it stronger standing in our culture. That effort had an optimistic energy behind it in those years, and registered some impressive gains. On its behalf, I found myself making two- and three-day visits, many if them repeated over the years, to nearly every professional opera enterprise in our country, filing field evaluations and recommendations covering the artistic, financial, and community involvement aspects of their situations. I attended conferences, conventions, and exploratory or organizational confabs, making speeches and sitting on panels. I contributed articles with titles like “Does Opera Have a Future?” to the magazines I wrote for, and others to the house organs or outreach publications of the agencies I was associated with. Always, the question of what opera might become ran along with that of how the form as we had known it could be extended and sustained. And to my mind, those questions were inseparable from those of just why it was that America had not yet found what it wanted to sing about, or how; of how our training and rehearsal methods should adapt to a world in which performers were ever farther removed from the sources of creativity in interpretation; and of how the kind of vitality that does not merely “interest” sympathetically inclined audiences, but thrills them, addicts them, might be maintained at a time when the supply of thrilling, addictive singers was dwindling and being spread thinner at one and the same time.

Most of the money spent to encourage the programming  of new operas (I am speaking of publicly accountable funds—from the NEA and the Arts Councils, from private or corporate foundations, more than I am of individual donations) was directed toward the production of works already commissioned or scheduled, intended for such expenses as a second dress rehearsal or extra orchestra service, or (a frequent one) toward the anticipated shortfall of box office income as compared with that for standard repertory pieces. But the adventures of two companies, the Center Opera in Minneapolis and Opera/South in Jackson, are especially instructive in the present context. The former was audacious in that it was artistically experimental, and the latter in that it owed its existence to what we’d now call a social justice, or inclusivity, initiative. And both offered rare examples of funding which, though nominally designated for one project or another, was in truth directed toward general support, toward the very existence of those companies in support of their stated missions.