Is the Opera America conference setup for composers? Not really. There is no welcome mat, but there are funny corners with some pretty powerful conversations taking place.

My experience today was about two very different rooms. The big room held big questions, big problems, big ideas, and big hopes. The small room was filled with tables and objects and entire ideals shrunk into miniature chachkas.

Yesterday, Opera America’s 2010 conference “New Realities/New Strategies” began, hosted by the Los Angeles Opera. I found that the most engaging part of it was the cocktail party, where I got to talk with a lot of different people from disparate ends of the opera world. Here are a few of my observations.