“This is not an art palace,” Howard Herring announced, his shoes gray with construction dust, his eyes intense under his hard hat. Herring took his job as president and CEO of the New World Symphony largely so he could oversee the building of “America’s orchestral academy’s” new Frank Gehry-designed campus. Some eight years later, here he was, herding a small group through the nearly completed building — the 10th tour he’d given to pols, flaks, journalists, caterers, board members, and other muckety-mucks last week. Now there’s just the matter of the $27 million that the Miami-Dade County Commission appears to have forgotten it promised to the project. Today there’s a resolution before the Commission to remind them.

Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Herring conjures symphonies from the exposed girders and rebar. Gesturing toward the building’s glass face from the future-park outside, he tells how Gehry’s curved forms on the other side of the glass will draw the public in, like “characters on a stage.” Large rehearsal rooms will be exposed as well. Everything is calculated to bring the symphony to the people.

“This is a laboratory,” Herring insists, explaining how the stage in the main hall is made of concentric half circles that can be configured for different purposes, from informal, mini-concerts with tickets selling for less than the cost of a Starbuck’s latte to club nights where bar tables replace the risers and a cutting edge classical performance is embedded within a night of drinks and DJ beats. High-speed, high def internet connections will bring the whole world of classical music to Miami Beach — and project it on a video screen on the side of the building for all of us to see and hear for free.

The Gehry campus is an instrument for NWS to reinvent the role of the orchestra in the community. NWS has long been reaching out to us from its current home in the Lincoln Theater, with free recitals and the occasional free concert. The new campus will allow the symphony to do much more and give us something vital we never even knew we were missing: to make soul-nourishing, classical music a part of our everyday lives. E-mail your commissioner about your support for the resolution today.