The Symphony of the Hills had this year mapped out. Music. Theme. They’d, of course, play in their venue in downtown Kerrville to the cheers of supporters.
“We began this idea that, okay, that’s going to be our 25th anniversary season,” Eugene Dowdy said. “So I jumped on that. So I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, if this is the 25th anniversary, that’s a big deal.'”
Eugene “Gene” Dowdy is the conductor and artistic director for the 70-member regional orchestra. Members, who come from San Antonio, Austin, and the Texas Hill Country, are paid.
To have a professional group with community support for 25 years is a big deal, Dowdy said of the Kerrville-based organization.
25 Years: A Time to Celebrate
The 2025-2026 season is called 25 Years: A Time to Celebrate. Each concert focuses on a segment of time worthy of recognition: A Time to Remember, A Time to Rejoice, A Time to Dance, A Time to Dazzle, and A Time to Soar.
“These lines from Ecclesiastes made famous in the Byrds’ folk rock anthem, turn, turn, turn,” he said. “And then there’s a time for everything under the sun are the lyrics. So a time to live, a time to die, a time to run, a time to walk, a time to dance, a time to weep, a time to run.”
The first concert after the July 4th Central Texas floods: A Time to Remember
CBS News Texas joined the musicians on their journey for their first concert of the year: A Time to Remember. Practice started on September 18. The members had not met as an orchestra since the devastating weather event that ravaged the Texas Hill Country on July Fourth.
As the members walked into the Tim Summerlin Music Education Building on the campus of Schreiner University in Kerrville, chummy chatter and instruments tuning up filled the ear as the first practice of an unbelievable season got underway.
“Good evening, everybody! Welcome back. Given that I know a lot of stories, I am crossed between amazed and giddy to see most of you here tonight,” Dowdy said.
The planning for the silver season started two years ago. Dowdy said no one could have imagined “A Time to Remember” would take on intended and memorial meanings.
July Fourth went from a patriotic holiday to peril for the Texas Hill Country. Over 115 were killed as floods rushed through the area. Three months, two people remain missing: 63-year-old Jeffrey Ramsey of Lewisville and eight-year-old Cecilia ‘Cile’ Steward of Austin. Search crews continue recovery efforts daily.
Music amid the tragedy: Kerrville Symphony’s shift in purpose
“So at one time we called it Bach to the Beatles because we wanted everything to be just the best of the best,” Dowdy said. “I tried to find the best piece by Bach that I knew, which was that famous toccata and fugue that Stokowski made famous. You know, dramatic and symphony rocking.”
Due to the death and devastation, changes were necessary. So much had occurred in the communities where the musicians are deeply connected.
Jennifer Cahill Clark is a music educator at Kerrville ISD and Schreiner University. The Arlington native is also a violist in the symphony. She met her husband Vince, a retired teacher from Mansfield, in North Texas. Clark has students who were at Camp Mystic. They survived. Some of their friends did not.
“One of our coaches said that you know she gathered kids from Camp Mystic and they took them to the place where the parents were waiting,” Clark said. “And the look on the parents’ faces … ‘Where are the rest of the kids?’ And they had — they said, ‘There are no more kids.'”
Her husband is a bus driver who rescued students from the camps. They knew something was different about the rainfall, she said. But Clark said the magnitude of what happened started to become clearer the morning of July 4th.
The Tivy High School teacher returned to school, but their popular soccer coach, Reece Zunker, his wife Paula, and their two children became victims of the flood. The school held a vigil for Zunker.
“You ask why, you know why? Why his whole family? Why all those beautiful children?” Clark said.”Then you go to school and you see those beautiful children, you know, and you think, well, we gotta move forward for them.”
Grief and stepping into the future without loved ones remains a challenge for a community that’s able to put on a face and extend its heart.
“I’m a pianist with a chainsaw. Everyone gets scared to hear me,” Don Crandall said.
Acts of rescue and grace
Crandall, a symphony member and a professor at Schreiner University, said he cut a family trip in New York short to come back to Texas to help his friends. He lives in Kerrville but went to Hunt to help Marshall and Rena Bailey.
“For about three weeks, I was here, most every day, not every day, to help. Marshall had this shed of his over here. He’s got years of tools and equipment that he needs daily on his job,” Crandall said. “He’s a master electrician, sought after by many here in the Hill Country.”
Crandall said that as quickly as they tried to save the tools, rust came. His Marshall was not charging neighbors in need. His wife, Rena, described the flooding in Hunt as a Tsunami that looked like boiling water approaching her home. The characteristics, as she recalled, were haunting, causing chaos through the flashes of lightning, claps of thunder, and unrelenting rain.
“It was Armageddon outside with the rain and just noise from all the thunder and lightning,” Bailey said. “The post office just literally exploded. It just crumbled and blew up and went away in the river. The Hunt Store started coming apart in pieces. The whole scene was this awful grinding, crashing, banging noise. It sounded like bombs going off.”
Bailey, who had to wake her husband up that morning, said he would eventually push her out of a window to safety. She was wearing a high heel on one foot and a sneaker on the other. She said they made it to a cabin on their property where they dropped to their knees and prayed.
“We held each other because we survived. He (Marshall) said, Let’s pray,” Bailey said. “We just sat on the floor and held each other and just prayed that everything would be okay.”
Crandall would lend them one of his trucks for weeks because the couple watched their vehicles float away.
Symphony cellist Mark Nugent wanted to contribute as well. The former police officer from Illinois, who has lived in Kerrville for 21 years, felt the weight of the tragedy.
Music for the mourning
“Just the tragedy of that event, on the Fourth of July. That was such a horrific blow to this community,” Nugent said. “And I remember just sitting there going, ‘What can I do?’ It was almost a feeling of helplessness.”
Nugent contacted Kerrville Joe Herring to see if he could set up his electric cello outside the business to play for mourners. He recalled pictures of the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostapovich playing at the Berlin Wall when it came down. Nugent did the same near the “River of Angels” Memory Wall. A fence on Water Street that became a memorial site.
“It was uniquely public, but it was also very private,” he said.
For 45 minutes, Nugent said he performed music from Schindler’s List, Ashokan Farewell, Bach, and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Edelweiss, to name a few songs.
“I didn’t want them to focus on my music. I wanted them to focus on the wall,” Nugent said. “But it was that quiet music that just let them know that I was supporting them. And that I was feeling their pain a little bit.”
Dowdy, like many of his musicians, had played at memorial services for the deceased. He performed at the Zunker family service. Dowdy also played the violin at the services of 8-year-old Renee Smajstrla. The duty is not joyful, but must be done.
“It was an honor to play for her memorial service,” he said. “Oh my gosh, I mean, I think back on it now, it’s emotional.”
A season reimagined
The layers of what was to be an all-out celebration had to change. Beethoven, Amy Beach, Mozart, and Remembering the Beatles stayed on the program as planned. Dowdy thought to memorialize the season, they’d include Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, movement four, Adagietto.
“That piece is for those who are lost, that piece is for those who suffered, that piece is for those who are rebuilding, it’s for us here, together now, you know, in music,” he said.
The audience of The Kathleen C. Cailloux City Center for the Performing Arts was asked not to applaud at the end of the Mahler. Instead, use the time to reflect. For some, including Dowdy, the silence invited a chance for emotional release.
The Symphony of the Hills performed in San Antonio at Trinity University for a benefit concert to assist flood victims.