In the World Room of the Columbia School of Journalism, we stand in two rows in a shallow arc. We are journalists, in New York for 10 days as fellows of the sixth annual National Endowment for the Arts Classical Music and Opera Institute. But we are trying, for the moment, to be a chorus.

“There’s a place for us,” we intone, under the direction of New York vocal coach and conductor Judith Clurman.

“Not everyone has to sing the ‘ss’ sound in ‘place’ for it to be heard,” she says, as she leads us through “Somewhere” from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” She assigns the sound to two singers in our group of 24 — there’s less problem synchronizing a duet than two dozen — and asks us to try it again. Miracle: We sound great, and there’s no prolonged hissing.

No prolonged hissing and a place for ourselves: maybe that’s what the 24 of us, from newspapers (yes, there are some left), radio stations and internet sites around the United States, have come to New York to find. This day, a sunny day at the end of October, is just one small step in that progression.

The NEA has been in the business of hosting workshops for dance, theater and music journalists for many years. In the late-’70s, I attended the dance critics conference it still runs in conjunction with the American Dance Festival; it put me in touch with both leading critics and main terpsichorean currents, and it shaped how I think about dance to this day. I came to New York — where the Columbia University School of Journalism hosts the classical music institute with NEA — hoping for a similarly formative experience.

I was not disappointed.

On the contrary, days that began at 9 a.m. and often ended way past midnight, as we filed overnight reviews and think pieces, left us all equal parts exhilarated and exhausted. The writing faculty — music historian and former New York Times critic Joseph Horowitz; New York magazine’s Justin Davidson; New York Times culture editor James Oestreich and culture reporter Dan Wakin; the Washington Post’s Anne Midgette; and the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout — practiced its own breed of tough love. NPR’s Anya Grundman and Columbia’s Andras Szanto, both of whom organize the workshop along with Horowitz, cheered us on and contributed their arts expertise.

The exhaustion was OK. We fought it off as comrades in arms. Friendships formed as quickly as opinions of what we’d seen.

Which included: “West Side Story” on Broadway (don’t bother: terrible singing, limp dancing); “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera (exalting, with Renee Fleming as the Marschallin and Susan Graham as Octavian; Mahler symphonies with Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony Orchestra (two of the most memorable, moving concerts of my life). We had an evening of Chinese village bands at Zankel Hall at Carnegie (boisterous and exotic); and a trip to the Greenwich Village classical music club Le Poisson Rouge, where the warmup piano trio, Trio Cavatina (a recent Naumburg Award winner), knocked our socks off in Mendelssohn even more than the featured attraction, the Hugo Wolf Quartet. The venue was the former Village Gate, which I remembered well from my folk music-filled adolescence in New York. Now it’s enjoying a renaissance as classical and contemporary musicians seek alternate venues and formats to bring the music to the people.

That job — bringing the music to the people — is as much the purview of music writers as musicians. But we have to put music into words, a tricky act of translation our writing coaches gave us lots of help with. Find the right word — “It’s worth it to stay up late finding it,” Davidson prodded my group of six.” And don’t look over your shoulder worrying if you are right or not, said Horowitz. “There’s always somebody out there who knows more than you do.” That notion, though hardly new, was somehow freeing, allowing us to open up and say what we felt and thought.

Horowitz, the author of several books, including a history of classical music in America, spent a lot of time talking to us not only about changes in performance styles and expectations for an “American style” to emerge (which I gathered was a little like waiting for Godot), but about the state of the American orchestra and how it got to its current precarious position (big grants in the ’60s and high salaries). Incidentally, he will be in Ann Arbor when the Chicago Symphony plays here in January, heading up a conference on collaboration between orchestras and the intellectual community. “For the most part,” he says, orchestras “have been relatively stranded for a long time (unlike art museums, dance companies, theater companies).”

If most of our nights were spent in the front of the hall, days were devoted to backstage activities. Not only did we get great concert-prep sessions with leading musicologists and work with conductors like Clurman for some first-hand music-making, we also roamed the city. We visited with George Steel, head of New York City Opera at the new David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. We talked with Peter Gelb, head of the Metropolitan Opera (who was not at all unhappy he said, about the new, controversial “Tosca”), and enjoyed an amazing backstage tour at the Met (here a leaf-filled tube labeled “Boxwood Garlands for ‘Norma,’” there the giant schnoz for Shostakovich’s “The Nose”).

One afternoon, we got the inside scoop — and lots of anecdotes — from Carnegie Hall archivist Gino Francesconi. Bet you didn’t know the nucleus of Carnegie’s archive derives from an ad he tried to place in AARP’s Modern Maturity magazine when the hall was turning 100 (Believe it or not, the hall did not have an archivist until the late 1980s). The ad rep said, “That’s not an ad. We should do a story.” It did, and collections of old programs and other artifacts began to pour in at the hall by the kilo.

And sadly, we were at the New York Times, to converse Jim Oestreich and reporter Dan Wakin, just as the staff gathered to hear the bell tolling for yet another 100 job cuts in the newsroom. It was ghastly.

And it was a reminder that as arts journalists, finding our way on the web is critical. Blog, blog, blog was the advice we got from everyone from the New Yorker’s Alex Ross to pianist Jeremy Denk, who also played a private concert for us at WNYC’s new performance space (“Think Denk” at his blog). And use the web’s resources, visual and aural, to enhance your writing. So I’ll leave you where I started, with “Somewhere” — sung not by a bunch of journalists trying to pretend they’re choristers,” but by Reri Grist in the original 1957 Broadway production. It’s stunning.

Susan Isaacs Nisbett is a free-lance writer who covers classical music and dance for AnnArbor.com.