Abstract
Higher Conservatories of Music confront for the thousandth time, alongside with the rest of higher artistic education institutions, a new historic opportunity of definition concerning their value in the framework of the state education system. The sudden intensification of their traditional condition of precariousness -accelerated by external as much as internal factors–, alongside with a very deep qualitative change about the horizon of expectations of managers and users, is collaborating to generate a majority state of opinion with a highly critic and demanding polarity. The main subject of this paper is to analyse near and remote reasons of this state of affairs, as well as the possibilities of realizing the aspirations of the involved sectors.5