Winston-Salem Symphony

Winston-Salem was founded on the idea that a city needs more than industry to survive — it needs a soul. The Winston-Salem Symphony is one of the oldest professional arts organizations in the Piedmont Triad, and it has been doing the work of building that soul for a long time.

The symphony performs primarily at the Stevens Center. Its education programs reach young people through concerts built specifically for them and through youth orchestras — an investment in the next generation of musicians and listeners that says something real about what the organization believes its job to be.

The city that created the first arts council in the United States understood something early: that a place known for tobacco and textiles still needed to make room for the arts, and that making room meant building institutions that could last. The Winston-Salem Symphony is one of those institutions. It hired its first full-time conductor in 1955 — a marker of an organization serious enough about its mission to professionalize it.

None of this was inevitable. Professional orchestras in mid-sized American cities have always been fragile things, dependent on civic will and community generosity. The fact that this one endured, grew, and kept its education programs intact is not a given. It is a choice, made repeatedly over decades.

Go for the music, obviously. But go also because the Stevens Center is the kind of place where the city shows up for itself — not for tourists, not for a ranking, but because Winston has always understood that what gets built here, by the people here, is what defines the place. The symphony is proof that the definition held.