Atlanta Symphony

The Atlanta Symphony is presented through a concert at Symphony Hall in the Woodruff Arts Center, where the evening’s music unfolds against a charged social backdrop. The performance becomes more than a program of orchestral works: its lobby gathers the city’s gossip, while listeners’ differing responses reveal the pressures of status and belonging surrounding the event.

Program and Performance

The evening’s program pairs Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, known as the Pastorale, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag. The concert’s formal sequence offers a striking counterpoint to the excitement in the lobby: the audience’s attention is pulled toward news circulating outside the music as well as toward the works onstage.

During Beethoven’s Sixth, Raymond Peepgass experiences the orchestra physically as well as musically. The low sounds resonate in his belly, while the rising and falling passages prompt his mind to wander. The music reminds him of church services and Sunday school, which he attended as a child before his family moved from St. Paul to San Jose. His recollection of nearly drowning after stepping onto thin ice at age four gives way to an adult reckoning: once the brightest and most promising student, he now finds himself heavily in debt and unable to attend cultural events without someone else paying for his ticket.

The Lobby and the City’s Gossip

As concertgoers gather in the lobby, the ordinary buzz grows into a roar. Their animated looks and greetings accompany repeated mention of Inman Armholster, Elizabeth Armholster, and Fareek Fanon. The orchestra’s evening is thus framed by a public scandal that has overtaken the audience’s attention before the performance begins.

Martha Croker and Peepgass have been discussing the same news on their drive down from Buckhead in a rented Volvo. Peepgass treats Inman’s prominence and the surrounding story as gossip; Martha responds more personally, thinking of Elizabeth’s mother and imagining what it would be like to face the situation. Her sympathy persists despite the fact that Elizabeth has treated her as a nonperson since Martha’s divorce from Charlie Croker.

The lobby also makes social visibility tangible for Martha. Three prominent women—Lettie Withers, Lenore Knox, and Betty Morrissey—approach her to greet her and discuss the news. Martha takes their renewed attention as a sign that she is visible again, and attributes it not to the scandal but to Peepgass’s presence beside her. For Peepgass, accompanying Martha offers proximity to a wealthy and influential social world whose members he had previously known only from afar.

Audience, Music, and Belonging

The performance also becomes a stage for Peepgass’s private anxieties. While Beethoven’s Sixth continues, the music’s rises and falls leave room for memories of childhood promise and present financial precarity. The concert hall offers a temporary refuge from his thoughts about debt and a stalled career, but does not resolve them; in the darkness, he wonders how to climb out of his situation.

At the concert’s end, Roger Too White and Henrietta move with the crowd through the lobby. Roger jokes that Scott Joplin’s piece has been placed at the end as a light, familiar musical reward after Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, then breaks off before his wording can carry an unintended racial implication. He clarifies that he does not think Joplin was included because of his race, describing the rag as familiar, happy, and bouncy instead. His broad smile is deliberate: as far as he can tell, he and Henrietta are the only Black people in the hall, and he wants the white concertgoers around them to see that they feel neither intimidated nor out of place. The scene makes the orchestra’s audience part of the evening’s subject, exposing how a concert’s cultural setting can shape the meaning listeners fear or assign to its music.