“We imagined what we could be. Now we become it.”
One of the ideas that has guided our first season at the Johns Creek Symphony Orchestra is that an orchestra should be more than something you attend a few nights a year.
A concert lasts an evening. Music can stay with someone for decades. If that is true, then part of our responsibility is not only to prepare performances at the highest level, but to think seriously about how music can remain present in the life of a community between concerts as well.
That thinking led us to begin curating playlists connected to our programs this season.
Not as a gimmick. Not simply as marketing. As another way of serving our audience.
A listener might enter the emotional world of a concert before arriving, revisit it after the final applause, or discover a connection to a piece in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. These may seem like small gestures but I believe the future of orchestras will be built through many small gestures done sincerely and consistently. Great performances matter deeply. So do relationships.
Our season theme this year has been IMAGINE: What Can We Be Together? Each concert has explored that question from a different angle: memory, healing, family, tradition, joy, and the ways music can help people feel connected to one another.
For our season finale, IMAGINE: Passing the Baton, we created a playlist centered on family, growth, legacy, and what is handed to us long before we know how to describe it. The concert features David and Julie Coucheron performing together, which feels especially meaningful. Music is often first passed forward not on stage, but at home: through encouragement, discipline, example, sacrifice, and love.
One of my earliest memories is hearing my father, an amateur violinist, practicing at home while I fell asleep nearby. Another is attending a concert with him as a child, falling asleep again, and being carried out of the hall in his arms. Years later, I learned the artist we had gone to hear was Yo-Yo Ma.
Apparently, falling asleep to music has been a lifelong theme.
I do not remember every note from those experiences. What I remember is how music felt when it was shared with love.
Years later, while conducting performances of The Nutcracker with Atlanta Ballet, my eldest daughter attended rehearsals and performances with me. Those were long days for a child, and unforgettable days for a father.
Becoming a parent changes the meaning of inheritance. You begin to think less about titles or possessions and more about patience, courage, tenderness, discipline, standards, and what children absorb simply by being in the room.
That spirit shaped this playlist. It begins in wonder, moves through friendship and shared paths, turns toward growth and becoming, and ends in gratitude, joy, and the future we build together. At its center is Felix Mendelssohn, a youthful genius who became an artist of elegance, brilliance, and depth. Around him are voices from many worlds: The Beatles, Billy Joel, Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, and others. Our lives are not lived in one genre. We are shaped by masterworks, by songs from childhood, by melodies tied to family memories, and by music that returns to us at exactly the right moment.
This season, we asked what we could imagine together. We welcomed new audiences, built new partnerships, expanded educational pathways, and discovered new possibilities for what a regional orchestra can mean to its city.
Next season, we take the next step. We become an organization rooted in timeless music and a shared future through artistic excellence, deeper partnerships, educational opportunity, and ideas that meet our community where it lives now.
Johns Creek deserves cultural institutions that honor tradition while building what comes next.
We are proud to do that work here.
Season One asked what was possible. Season Two begins the work of becoming it.
We imagined what we could be. Now we become it.
Sincerely,
Henry Cheng
Music Director, Johns Creek Symphony Orchestra
