Mission

The mission of the Chattanooga Symphony & Opera is to inspire, engage, and enrich the greater Chattanooga community through music and music education.

What We Do

The Chattanooga Symphony & Opera is Chattanooga's only fully professional performing arts organization and one of our region's largest arts employers. The presence of a professional orchestra in Chattanooga makes it possible for our community to employ more than 300 professional musicians in a traditional season and provide performance opportunities for another 400 volunteer choirs, singers, and musicians. These artists are a huge community asset: they live and work in our region, perform for private events, and teach in area colleges, schools, and private studios.

Our mission to inspire, engage, and enrich the greater Chattanooga community through music and music education reaches throughout Eastern Tennessee and three bordering states. We do this through roughly 20 mainstage performances like Classics (formerly Masterworks), attracting 16,000+ audience members annually, and over 100 education performances and programs, serving another 16,000+ students and adults. Our childhood education programs inspire (through Family and Young People's Concerts) and teach (through the Youth Symphony) the next generations of musicians and arts appreciators in our region. Their interest is cultivated through adulthood with casual programs like DeClassified and Pops, which attract and engage new audiences. In late adulthood, generations have developed into the classical aficionados that most enjoy our Classics and opera performances, many of whom re-invest in this pathway through donations, board service, or volunteerism.

Some people don't have the privilege to participate in this musical pipeline throughout life, and often those are the people who would benefit most from musical engagement. Because 1 in 4 Tennesseeans has a disability, we strive to serve this audience by making the CSO as accessible as possible. We built the Sensory Friendly Series and the All-Accessible Concert specifically to serve the disabled people in our community, and have augmented our other performances with services to improve the concert experience for disabled patrons.