In January 1994, an array of singers assembled in Carnegie Hall to celebrate Marilyn Horne’s 60th birthday. Though any opera house would have envied the talent on hand, these musicians didn’t sing opera — they sang songs. Ms. Horne’s brilliant career as a mezzo-soprano was far from over, but she had embarked on a new crusade: the song recital. Ms. Horne had recognized a decline in its popularity, and she resolved to do something about it.

Enter the Marilyn Horne Foundation, which, as Ms. Horne put it succinctly in a telephone interview last week, “does what we need to do to build an audience.” Thanks to the Foundation, Carnegie Hall continues to resound with song every January, under the rubric “The Song Continues … ” which runs this year between January 23 and 26 as a joint presentation with the Weill Music Institute.

So what has changed over the past 12 years? “Things are a little better now than they were back then,” Ms. Horne said. “We can’t take full credit, but we’ll take a piece of it. We’re trying to move recitals front and center, and I think you see more about them in the newspapers now.”

Ms. Horne’s claim for credit appears well deserved. Although the January event is the Foundation’s annual highprofile venture, its day-to-day operations lie elsewhere. Since its inception, the Foundation has presented 100 young singers in 240 recitals, each linked with educational appearances by the singer in area schools.

One goal is to rekindle the kind of opportunities Ms. Horne had as a young singer. “When I came back from Europe in the early ’60s, I booked three recitals in the first year. The very next year, after people concluded that this kid is interesting, I had 20 to 25 recitals. This couldn’t happen today,” she said.

A typical American organization might give five or six recitals a year, she explained. “They might bring in Renée Fleming or Tom Hampson and some instrumentalists, but no young artists. That’s where we come in. We do the funding so they can have a shot at it.”

This year “The Song Continues … ” includes four duo-recitals by eight young foundation singers in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, as well as master classes by Barbara Cook, Evelyn Lear, and Ms. Horne in Zankel Hall. The series concludes with a recital in Zankel, which will include the world premiere of songs by Gabriela Lena Frank and a guest appearance by tenor Marcello Giordani.

To those who delight in song recitals in their classic form — a program of lieder by Schubert and Wolf, say — it is almost inexplicable that the song recital could be a hard sell. “We try to stir this up, to show people that this is something they ought to believe in,” Ms. Horne said. Whatever the problems — be it a language barrier, a lack of familiarity with the repertoire, or a perceived sense that performances by a lone singer and a pianist are somehow old-fashioned — the Horne Foundation is ready to confront them, whether by promoting supertitles in recitals or by going into the schools.

One hopeful sign for the form is singers’ eagerness to cultivate recital-giving abilities, regardless of the recitals’ popularity with the public. Ms Horne spends her summers at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, Calif., “the Rolls Royce of summer schools,” as she calls it. Recently, each singer was asked about his or her career aspirations. “Everyone said they wanted to be not just a fine opera singer, but also a fine recitalist,” Ms. Horne said. “I was very happy to hear that.”

Until January 26 (57th Street and Seventh Avenue, 212-247-7800).