New KSO President Amy Williams is on a mission to make orchestral music feel like home

In Savannah, Ga., Amy Williams worked to “Phil the Neighborhoods” with music.

She’s now arriving in Kalamazoo to see how she can bring our symphony to more people. Williams will become the new CFO and President of the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra on May 26.

Her life’s work has been about bringing people to symphonic music and bringing symphonic music to the people. 

Williams found that the KSO is also on the same path. “I see the Kalamazoo Symphony and all the programming that it does within the community, and just all the work it’s doing to break down those barriers. It really speaks to who I am, not just professionally, but who I am personally,” she says.

Getting to know Williams 

Second Wave caught Williams in Kalamazoo, at one of the venues she’ll get to know, Chenery Auditorium, in April.

We got to know Williams. She’s working to get husband Paul and cat Cleo to a new home in Portage. She loves hiking and is excited about the trails and nature surrounding Kalamazoo. She knows ocean beaches and is about to experience the freshwater shores of the Great Lakes.

About Kalamazoo, Williams says, “I know there’s a lot of activity, I know there’s a lot of growth happening.”

Farm country origins to piccolo fireworks

She grew up in Barre, Mass., a small farming community in the middle of the state. 

In grade school, Williams took up flute, then bassoon. She loved the Boston Pops. Watching the Pops on TV for the 4th of July, she was spellbound when “the flute players and the piccolos would stand up and play ‘Stars and Stripes’ with fireworks going off. So that was sort of my dream, was to stand up and play piccolo during fireworks.

“As you get older, you realize that they’re not going to play fireworks for you just because you’re playing your instrument,” she adds.

A love of music took her to Ithaca College, the University of Nevada, and Ohio State. “If I didn’t have music, I would have still been in a town of 4,000,” Williams says. She thinks she could have ended up as a music teacher in the local schools. 

“But, from playing an instrument, and then just taking those next steps, you start seeing more and more, and you discover what’s possible. “

100 musicians who can play anything

Lack of literal fireworks every time she played wasn’t the reason she switched from being a musician to getting on the administrative path.

Music opened up a world for her, yet “I did not hear a professional orchestra until I was majoring in music in college.”

As a child, “I asked my parents if we could go, and they said it wasn’t for us. We couldn’t afford the tickets, they didn’t know what to wear, and they didn’t know when to clap — that was a very big deal for my mother.” 

Williams was at Ohio State, working on her doctorate in music, when “I started thinking about what I really loved was seeing people come into the concert hall for the first time. And putting an orchestra on stage.”

She went west to become a production associate with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. There she learned the basics of getting an orchestra on stage, “and worked my way up.”

Then came roles in artistic and educational directorship. “That was really where I started seeing the two sides of the world come together,” she says. Williams worked to get kids and their families “into the concert hall for the first time.”

Families got the unique experience of feeling the combined vibrations from winds, brass, and percussion. “Just that excitement that comes from experiencing something, that is really only unique in that moment — that has an energy to it unlike anything else,” Williams says.

We mention the KSO’s recent “Symphonic Beats” concert, which combined the orchestra with local hip-hop artists. It began with pianist Monica Washington Padula taking classical-oriented piano into musical territory not familiar to many KSO regulars, but known to much of the audience that night, Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On.”

“I would say everyone needs to start with something that they know. That’s the first entry point to anything. It’s like, ‘oh, I recognize that,’ and then it suddenly becomes safer, right?

“It’s just so important for an orchestra to be more than just classical,” Williams says. “Really, an orchestra can play anything. It’s a hundred musicians that can play anything. “

“Phil the Neighborhoods”

In 2020, during COVID, she had the opportunity “to run an arts organization in a region of the country that I’ve never lived in,” Williams says with a laugh.

She moved to Georgia to become CEO of the Savannah Philharmonic. 

The pandemic had hit the Philharmonic. Simply bringing back the audience by returning to the status quo wasn’t enough for Williams.

“We had some work to do. We had to work to build our audience,” she says. 

But, “I’d rather think of it as breaking down the barrier than building an audience, because people just need to be invited in. If they don’t feel welcome when they come in, they might not come back. If they can’t grasp that one thing that they know, or have that one person even say, ‘Hello, welcome, did you have a good time?'” — Then, why buy tickets for another concert?

The “heart” of building an audience is “creating the environment for people to feel welcome.” They “then go home and talk to their friends and neighbors.” The best marketing is “a neighbor saying, ‘Hey, I went to this thing, and I had a good time.’ “

Williams oversaw the effort to get neighbors to gather for “Phil the Neighborhoods.” Up to 700 people would gather at free pop-up concerts. Leaning into “that Southern hospitality” thing, Williams says, they played to front porches, at community events, and in parks. 

“Phil” was simply “a small group of musicians, a sound engineer, and they play a one-hour concert. We take people through everything from Taylor Swift and all of the pop music into Beethoven, and that’ll all be probably within this, within the same hour.”

Then those people “come into the concert hall, because again, we’ve gone to them, we’ve invited people, and then they come back. Then they come see us next time. “

Learning Kalamazoo at “warp speed”

The Savannah Philharmonic showed “unprecedented growth” during the season starting in September 2024, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote in 2025. The credit goes to the inclusion of contemporary music along with the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and doing community outreach efforts, the paper wrote.

Will Williams remake the KSO as she did in Savannah? 

She says she’s not here to shake things up. The KSO has a rich history, Williams knows.

“I just want to learn more. I think if I could learn more and more, and fast, about the KSO and the Kalamazoo community, the different parts of the Kalamazoo community, the more I know, the more excited I would become. So now it’s just, how can I learn everything at warp speed?”

Williams’ first KSO concert she attended was Feb. 21, when they performed the Mahler Symphony No. 3 at Miller Auditorium. 

Gustav Mahler’s 1896 work is not pop and not very familiar to a general audience. It was new to the 105-year-old KSO — they’d never performed it.

Williams was amazed that “so many ages were in the house. It was so exciting!” 

She saw that the KSO audience was “young, and it was different, and they were excited…. It spoke a lot about what the organization and the orchestra are to the community, and how everyone was wanting to come together for that experience.”

Williams says of the KSO, “I’m excited to see it keep growing. It has such momentum and such excitement.”

She wants to continue to build bridges to Kalamazoo’s community, and to people outside of the City limits, Williams says. “I’m really interested in what those bridges look like.”