For the Love of Music
by Phil Kloer
The arts play a key role in building vibrant, healthy communities. But arts institutions can only play that role if they have the means.
Enter the donors. Big ones and small ones, whales and minnows, one-and-dones and monthly contributors. More than half of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s annual budget comes from its donors.
“Gifts from our community of supporters are the foundation for all that the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is able to do each year,” said Grace Sipusic, Vice President of Development. “From concerts by our world-class orchestra, to our impactful educational programs, to our amazing and world-renowned chorus, we depend on the generosity of our community to bring these programs to life.”
Here are four members of the ASO donor family who help keep the doors open and the music playing at Symphony Hall.
Arthur and Carla Mills
Arthur and Carla Mills are the kind of folks who dive right in.
Not long after Sipusic met Arthur for coffee at a Buckhead Starbucks to get to know him, he agreed to be the founding chair of the ASO’s Advisory Council, a group of significant donors who are advocates in the community and advise the ASO’s leadership team on diversity and inclusion.
“Some may think the symphony is for a more experienced or affluent crowd,” said Carla. “But we’ve had several friends and associates who have joined us at events and said, ‘This is incredible; I’ve never thought about this before.’ We’d love to look back at some point and see this has led the ASO to be a more inclusive institution.”
Music was part of both their lives growing up. Arthur played trumpet in his high school orchestra and marching band, and in a small jazz combo in college. Carla played piano and sang in the school choir. The couple married in 2010, eventually settled in Atlanta, and have been connecting with the city ever since in a variety of ways.
The ASO Advisory Council is “about broadening the appeal of the symphony to make all the elements more diverse and inclusive,” said Arthur, who is Chief Operating Officer of the New Teacher Center, a national not-for-profit organization. “We have close to 60 families engaged that are helping us create new pipelines into new communities where we have not been able to sustain relationships previously.”
Carla is Senior HR Director for Stanley Black & Decker, the tool manufacturer. “We love the arts,” she said, “and we want to make sure we can make them accessible and enjoyable for all communities who may not have historically even thought about the ASO as a great place to experience Atlanta.”
Kristina “Kiki” Wilson
of Choruses Norman Mackenzie at a recent ASO Chorus rehearsal.
“Music has been at the core of my life from the get-go,” said Kiki Wilson.
A veteran member of the ASO Chorus and Executive Producer of the PBS documentary “Robert Shaw: Man of Many Voices,” Wilson has been an important member of the ASO family for decades.
And she is also a donor.
“Executive Director Jennifer Barlament has shown tremendous leadership, and naming Nathalie Stutzmann as the new Music Director is such a fabulous decision. As a duo they won’t just bring Atlanta to the symphony, but bring the symphony to Atlanta.”
When I was in high school, I had a recording of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the Prelude and Liebestod,” she recalled. “I had one of those little kids’ turntables, and would play it over and over. I can’t believe I didn’t wear a hole in that album. My poor mother.”
Wilson studied voice, conducting, piano and flute, earned her undergraduate degree in music performance from Washington University and her Master’s in Choral Conducting from Northwestern University. But she realized she probably did not have what it takes to be a professional musician, so she worked at Delta Technology when she moved to Atlanta in 1981 with her husband, the late Dr. Frank Wilson Jr., who was Chief of Emergency Services at Piedmont Hospital and a clinical professor at Emory University.
She has also been a member of the ASO Chorus for years and reveres Shaw to this day.
“I grew up making music in very professional situations, so there was a standard,” she said. “But he had a standard that was that much higher. He prepared us so meticulously that when it came time to make music, you could make music effortlessly because all of these disciplines were underneath it.”
Wilson is looking forward to singing Mozart’s Requiem with Stutzmann later this season. She is an alto, one of the lowest altos in the chorus. “Altos think they’re pretty hot stuff,” she said with a laugh. “And they are.”
John B.
John B. is an anonymous donor in the ASO’s Symphony Sustainers program, where he makes automatic monthly payments. In 2022, he plans to increase his support to the Leadership level ($2,000+ annually), and he has also recently included the ASO in his estate plans.
“My father passed away in May and left me a trust which has allowed me to think about the future,” he explained. “Before that I was on a fixed income and could not give very much money away. This is a new experience for me.”
“I’ve always had an appreciation for classical music and I thought that especially now with the hardships of the last two years, the ASO was the perfect group to receive that,” he continued.
“I wanted to do something that would last beyond my own life.”
John claims no musical ability at all — not even, he joked, any sense of rhythm — but music has been important to him his entire life. He first fell in love with classical music as a boy listening to his father’s records of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Later, when his family lived in England, he attended the BBC Proms in London in the late ’50s.
Jazz and Broadway show tunes were also popular at home, but John started listening to rock as a teenager. Even then, he was drawn to groups like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer that played rock versions of classical music.
After a four-year tour in the Air Force that included a year in Vietnam, John attended college at Miami Dade Community College and Florida International University. He moved to Atlanta in 1980 and worked for several office equipment companies.
“My love of music right now is not only classical and opera but also jazz, especially the ’50s and ’60s: Miles Davis, John Coltrane,” he said. “I also like blues. I love music but I couldn’t play anything to save my life. I just like to listen to it.”
