Built for Joy in 2000, a gift from her husband Joseph, the instrument is a work of art in its own right: a beautiful yellow rose painted on the back plate, rosewood fittings, and tiny sculpted yellow roses on the tuning pegs. Her name is printed on the back.

When Joy was asked for a favorite memory from her time with the CSO, she pointed instead to this — the violin she’s poured 26 seasons of music through.

Her story with the instrument started long before that, in an after-school program in Houston ISD, where she picked up the violin in third grade. It became a lifelong calling. Joy spent 18 years as an instructional aide in Conroe ISD and taught orchestra for 10 of them, alongside her husband Joseph.

Ask her what she loves most about playing with the orchestra, and her answer is pure poetry:

“I picked up his viola and immediately played Mary Had a Little Lamb, without ever having picked up the instrument before,” she remembers.

That was fourth grade. She made All-State Orchestra as a high school freshman, played through college, and joined the Conroe Symphony Orchestra barely a year after graduating.

That was 29 seasons ago. All told, Madilene has played viola for about 43 years — and today she serves as the CSO’s Principal Viola.

Ask her what keeps her coming back, and her answer is almost meditative:

That sense of music as refuge is something Madilene has leaned on more than most.

In September 2007, on an ordinary morning at a Huntsville bank drive-thru, she was carjacked and taken hostage at gunpoint by two men who had escaped from the Huntsville prison. She survived, something she does not take for granted, and does not tell as a story of fear, but as one of faith and strength.

“I definitely had angels protecting me that day,” she says. She later learned that a woman from her church had felt a sudden, pressing need to pray for someone’s protection that very morning, about an hour before it happened — unknowingly praying for Madilene. “God works in awesome ways.”

Recovery took time, months of it. Her three boys were just four, seven, and nine. And through the hardest stretch, the person beside her was her husband, Shane. It’s no small thing that when we asked Madilene what she can’t live without, her answer was simply: “My husband, who is my rock and supporter in everything. We are best friends.” A traumatic event can break a marriage. Theirs it made stronger.

Debbie Andrew’s entire musical life turned on a single, cheerful yes.

She was a flute player in junior high when her band director came looking for someone to take up the bassoon. “He asked if I’d like to play,” Debbie remembers, “and I said, ‘Yes — what is it?'”

She didn’t even know what the instrument was. She said yes anyway. Sent to the choir room to teach herself for the rest of the semester, she figured it out one note at a time.

“It was rough at first,” she says, “but it worked out!”

Fourteen seasons with the Conroe Symphony Orchestra later, it’s safe to say it worked out. Today Debbie plays co-principal bassoon — on an instrument that happens to be 103 years old.

Ask her what she loves about playing here, and it’s the same thing so many of our musicians describe — a kind of peace that arrives the moment the music starts:

Joel came to music honestly. His first teacher was his own father. “From violin to cymbals to trumpet to baritone to guitar and also vocals, my dad was always there to teach and encourage me,”

Joel says. Asked what he’d say to his father now, his answer is simple and complete: