John B. White, Jr. is a retired senior consultant for the Coca-Cola Company, where he worked for 34 years. He had a leading role in governmental relations and, for several years, served as executive assistant to the president of Coca-Cola. White is a life director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and his love for the ASO is revealed in his active involvement as a concertgoer and devotee of music over the decades. He recently joined Lois Reitzes on “City Lights” as part of their series, “50 Years of the ASO on WABE.”
White and his wife began attending ASO concerts in the late 1960s, just as Robert Shaw was transforming the ensemble into a world-class institution. “I had grown up singing Shaw’s choral arrangements, so when we moved to Atlanta, it was a dream to hear him live,” White recalled. Over the years, he built an extensive archive of ASO recordings, cataloging performances from reel-to-reel tapes to digital formats. “The orchestra makes beautiful sounds, and these broadcasts serve as a major repository of its history,” he said.
Among his most cherished memories is Robert Shaw’s final concert as music director in 1988, which featured Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” and Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony.” White also praised Yoel Levi’s tenure and Robert Spano’s commitment to contemporary composers. “People forget that all music was new music once,” he said, referencing the pushback that Spano received when championing composers like Jennifer Higdon, Michael Gandolfi, and Christopher Theofanidis.
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