Depending upon whom one reads over the past 15 years, music is either spiraling toward irrelevance or succeeding against all odds. In 2009 Henry Fogel, Dean of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, made the following statement in his keynote address to the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM): In June, the NEA released its national Arts Participation study for 2008, and in case nothing else I have said gives you cause for worry, that study should. It shows a dramatic decline in arts participation and attendance across the board, at all age levels, over the past six years. While we might wish to blame some of that on the economy, reading this study in detail indicates, I think something deeper — a continuing trend toward a distance between Americans and the arts. If we, at the higher education level, continue to train artists without dealing with the climate into which we are sending them, we run a very real risk of contributing to a continuing trend toward irrelevance.