By Christy Rodriguez de Conte 

In celebration of Tallahassee’s Bicentennial, the Council on Culture & Arts (COCA) will highlight a specific artist or organization each month that is the epitome of artistic ambition in our capital city. The spotlight on Dr. Amanda Stringer & the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra is the first of many artistic ambition spotlights!

Dr. Amanda Stringer leads through a love of music. This year, she and the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra celebrate the Bicentennial through a visual concerto sure to deepen your appreciation for our Capital City.

The history embedded in land is complex. Land provides passage and sustenance to all those who seek to nourish it. For this reason, the Tallahassee Trust for Historic Preservation and Matt Lutz, Director of Records Management, City of Tallahassee, has provided A Brief History of Tallahassee and Leon County to set the scene. Tallahassee has been blessed to behold the cultures shared by its many inhabitants over thousands of years. Early on, Native American settlers established trade in the Northwest area of what we now call Florida by building villages and sharing their love for people, music, art, and the land. During the Fort Walton era (1000 AD to 1575 AD), the Apalachee tribe cultivated and populated the area and eventually built the sacred Lake Jackson mounds. Here, people gathered for political and spiritual ceremonies, a tradition that has solidified itself as part of Tallahassee’s Capital City identity. Colonizing the land also brought violence and religion to the area as the Spaniards established missions, drastically changing the population. The Seminole tribe met similar fates against Andrew Jackson’s army as its members were forced to fight for the land harmoniously shared by all before. Although our history is littered with aggression, it is also filled with pride for the community and the people who have held the land we now live alongside sacred. Tallahassee was dubbed the capital of the Florida territory on March 4, 1824, and Leon County was officially born by the end of the year on December 29, 1824.

2024 marks Tallahassee’s Bicentennial and celebrates the intersections between history, people, music, and art. In addition to the community and its leaders, whose ambitions have fueled the past 200 years, we honor the land and its people who once bathed in its rivers and laughed in its forests. The melodies they sang reverberate in the picturesque views they left for us. The Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra (TSO) has taken on the challenge of combining music and photography to celebrate Tallahassee with similar artistic ambition. And here to spearhead the endeavor is the symphony’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Amanda “Mandy” Stringer.

Stringer began playing the piano at age 5. Inspired by her mother, a pianist, and her father, an English Literature scholar, Stringer pursues a life in the arts. She studied the piano throughout elementary school. By middle school, she had fallen in love with the instrument, which led her to earn four degrees in music. They include a Bachelor of Music in piano performance at Vanderbilt University, a Masters in Music in piano performance at Indiana University, a Doctorate of Musical Arts in piano performance at the University of Oklahoma, and a Certificate of Advanced Musical Studies from King’s College, London. This lifestyle was familiar since both her parents were professors at the University of Southern Mississippi. “They opened up a fascinating world of music, literature, and ideas to me; through their colleagues and friends, I was fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of very interesting, thoughtful people growing up,” shares Stringer. “[It’s] not what one might first think of as life in a small town in South Mississippi.” Her summers were spent in London, where her father taught a Shakespeare course. She and her mother visited places such as the National Gallery, National Theater, Tate Modern, Barbican Theatre, and Victoria and Albert daily. The life-affirming experiences solidified a love for the arts that would sustain Stringer throughout her artistic journey.

After years in academia, Stringer longed to connect to the community. She looked for professional fulfillment in many arenas and was delighted to find it in the world of arts administration. As a child of academics, the shift was scary at first, but Stringer did not take long to soar. She found inspiration from the “what if?” and “how to improve?” questions posed in administration. Ever the student of life and art, she participated in a 10-day intensive course through the League of American Orchestras called Essentials of Orchestra Management, and her trajectory changed. The Chief Executive Officer position at the TSO became available shortly after that, and Stringer was thrust into a leadership position for an art form she loved and a community she learned to listen to. “The TSO’s mantra is ‘outside-in, not inside-out,’ meaning that we seek to know what the community wants and needs from us,” says Stringer. For her, it is paramount that its programming reflect its patrons. To that point, the TSO has launched several social justice projects that engage and educate, beginning with the 2017 concert that told the story of Jewish prisoners in Terezin entitled Requiem of Resistance. Since then, they have continued this commitment with concerts like the Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, which quotes the last words of seven men unjustly killed at the hands of authority figures, and Walk in Dignity, which recounts the 1956 Tallahassee Bus Boycott. The TSO and Stringer have also created an annual Freedom’s Eve Emancipation Concert to celebrate Florida’s Emancipation Day of May 20.  

Stringer’s artistic ambition informs her work and approach to leadership. She admits that the relationship between those who make the music and those who run the organization is very nuanced and a true partnership. One cannot exist without the other. It takes the melodies produced by musicians in conjunction with informed strategic decisions delivered by TSO’s Board of Directors, Music Director Darko Butorac, and the TSO staff to create the fantastic productions seen on stage. Stringer is dedicated to disseminating her knowledge of music while cultivating a shared experience that elevates and enlightens all who attend.

Mandy Stringer focuses this year’s TSO Bicentennial celebration on the people of Tallahassee. To do so, she and her staff invited the community to assist as over 1,000 current and archival photos that best represent the things best loved about Tallahassee were gathered. Nicholas Bardonnay, Creative Director & CEO of Westwater Arts, known for producing the gold standard in visual concertos, has collected and curated the images into an original photo-choreography piece titled 200 Years of Tallahassee. This style of performance art blends breathtaking panoramic photography with live classical music. The work will be projected onto three large screens as the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra plays Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown, and Beige. This collection of home-grown images integrated with a symphonic soundtrack artistically unites the best of Tallahassee’s past and present, sharing in the beauty witnessed by those who behold it. 

Stringer is delighted to partner with Capital City Bank to celebrate Tallahassee’s artistic ambition, as only a live symphony orchestra can provide. “We hope to show Tallahassee’s ‘esprit de cour’ and our shared history,” says Stringer. “[Capital City Bank] sent us a bunch of great photos from their archives. We’ve also consulted with the Riley House, Florida Memory State Archives, Visit Tallahassee, and Tallahassee Democrat archives to collect images to compliment the ones submitted by the public.” Be sure to take the time to revel in the beauty and wonder of this unique visual concerto as the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra leads you on a journey through Tallahassee’s past and present and introduces a future of new possibilities driven by music and art. 

Learn more about A Tallahassee Bicentennial Celebration: Portraits of America