For the past 25 years, medical professionals at the University of Michigan have traded their medical instruments for musical ones.
The Life Sciences Orchestra is made up of members of the University of Michigan’s medical and life sciences community. Even in the face of demanding day jobs, the orchestra's members make time to practice with the ensemble — sometimes with their on-call pagers.
The group, which first formed in 2000, held its 50th concert last week, celebrating a quarter century of making music.
“What makes this orchestra so special is the combination of how many people are doing this for the enjoyment of it, but they also really enjoy coming prepared and playing to such a high level,” conductor Nick Bromilow told Stateside.
It is not uncommon for orchestra members to come to practice directly from the hospital, still wearing their white coats and scrubs. Eric Krukonis, an adjunct assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at UM, has been playing trumpet with the orchestra for 25 years.
“Can't tell you how many times we see doctors in their scrubs with their, well, maybe pagers when we started, now they're cell phones, but waiting to be called to run off to some surgery or whatever they have to do in an emergency,” said Krukonis.
Dr. Robert Bartlett is best known to the medicine world as “the father of ECMO,” a name he earned after developing a life support machine that UM says has helped more than 200,000 patients. But when Bartlett took his seat in the orchestra, Krukonis said he was just another musician to his bandmates.
“It was funny because I didn't know Bartlett was so famous, but his medical students would come by and they'd all be like, ‘That's Dr. Bartlett over there,’” Krukonis recalled. “So it was kind of funny to watch that people had their human side in the group. ... I'm sure they were high-level professionals in their day-to-day job, but no one brought that persona to the group. It was always a group effort. Everyone is an equal in the orchestra.”
The LSO's 25th anniversary concert was a performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, based on the Arabian folktales in One Thousand and One Nights. The piece is "narrated" by the princess Scheherazade, represented in the composition by the violin. In her performance, solo violinist Jennifer Weizer placates the barbaric sultan with fairy tales.
“It’s really a siren’s song,” Weizer said. “The trick is to make it varied and interesting every time, just as she's drawing the sultan in with different stories every night."
Throughout the piece, different instruments portray different elements of the story. The lower bass and string bass depict the sultan’s character while the flute plays an Arabic-inspired melody.
Weizer, who spends her days as an ophthalmologist, practiced her violin for about two hours a day to prepare for the concert. And, she said, while music and medicine might not seem to have a lot in common, she's found a common thread between her violin and clinical practice.
“Medicine is all about communication with patients,” Weizer explained. “So when you tell a story with music, it's not actually all that different from how you would tell a story or talk to a person in your clinic office. Communication is really universal.”
