Medical music

The lives of a scientists or physicians can seem unsustainably busy. But outside of labs and clinics, researchers and doctors make time to engage in extracurricular pursuits from skydiving to Sudoku. It turns out that music is a common distraction for many life science and health professionals, and specialized symphony orchestras around the world are chock full of PhDs and MDs celebrating the marriage of science and music."Music requires the same intense focus, microscopic analysis, and integrative story-telling that biology requires," said linkurl:Heidi Greulich,;http://www.broadinstitute.org/news/240 a cancer researcher at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard and a cellist in the Massachusetts-based linkurl:Longwood Symphony Orchestra,;http://www.longwoodsymphony.org/site/c.fqLJIXOGKtF/b.3958899/k.C050/Home.htm in an email to __The Scientist__. "Because of this, I end up using many of the same skills for playing music that I use in doing science. So perhaps it's not so surprising that so many scientists are also musicians."

For Keiko Fujino, a third year medical student at Sapporo Medical University in Tokyo, blending music and medicine is a little more difficult. "I learned the piano in my childhood," she said in an email to __The Scientist__. Like many children forced to tickle the ivories, Fujino had a falling out with the instrument and took up the viola during her first year of medical school. "I play 3 days a week and learn from a professional violist 2 or 3 times in a month." linkurl:Janet Stavnezer,;http://www.umassmed.edu/mgm/faculty/stavnezer.cfm professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at the University of Massachusetts medical school and a member of the linkurl:Seven Hills Symphony;http://www.shsymphony.org/ said that she finds time for the orchestra now that her daughter is grown. "I practice one hour a day after dinner...I take a lesson every week [she found her musical knowledge too scant after time off to raise a child] so I practice for that," she told __The Scientist__. "The bottom line is [if] one just concentrates on doing the most important things, then music fits in."For players, fitting music into already overwhelming schedules is one thing, but starting a medical orchestra is a whole different accomplishment. Joanna Chaurette, an MD/PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, founded the Seven Hills Symphony. "I knew about the Medical Arts Symphony in Kansas City and the Longwood in Boston so I figured I would give it a try," Chaurette wrote in an email to __The Scientist__. "Finding musicians was relatively easy compared to finding a place in the hospital or school to rehearse." Classrooms are too small, she explained, and amphitheaters have neither enough room at the front nor stages that can accommodate an orchestra. Chaurette and more than 20 musicians ended up commandeering a faculty conference room.The Medical Arts Symphony, one of the oldest in this country, had an easier time finding space to play in the Kansas University Medical Center, which sponsors the orchestra. The center allows the orchestra, which started in 1945, to rehearse and to give two concerts a year in an auditorium at the facility, and even foots the bill for printing the performance programs at the university print shop.Tetsuro Anzai, professor of internal medicine at Sapporo Medical University in Japan, founded the school's orchestra in 1954, with only four players, who crammed into a classroom to rehearse. The orchestra is now "able to practice at the hall stage" if there's no medical congress in progress, according to Fujino. The orchestra is composed entirely of medical students, who pay dues and play an annual concert in Sapporo's linkurl:Kitara Concert Hall;http://www.kitara-sapporo.or.jp/english/index.html and a Christmas concert in the hospital's lobby. Having an orchestra composed of healthcare and science professionals also leads to some unconventional performance settings. The Longwood Symphony Orchestra, for example, started a concert series last year called "LSO on call," where musicians play to patients in area hospitals a couple of times a month. "This October we're planning to have LSO on Call in Boston -- a blitz of more than 10 performances simultaneously going on in health care facilities across the city," said Lisa Wong, executive director of the orchestra and a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:The anatomy of creativity;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/55682/
[8th May 2009]*linkurl:Rock-It Science;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/55493/
[6th March 2009]*linkurl:An orchestra that works and plays;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/54920/
[7th August 2008]

Medical music

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