CLASSICAL
These doctors are making music during the pandemic.
ca’s medical musicians unite like never before, vastly expanding their patient rosters to mend spirits around the world with healing harmonies in John Masko’s latest venture.
Last May, the music director of the Providence Medical Orchestra — which shuttered its operations in March due to the pandemic — founded the National Virtual Medical Orchestra, bringing together 50 doctors, nurses, first responders and medical students from 15 medical orchestras across the country.
Four participating musicians — violinist Grace Lee, M.D.; violist and medical student Laura Michie; oboist Anne Anderson, M.D.; and trumpet player Andrew Roseborrough, DMA — are members of Houston’s Texas Medical Center Orchestra, which was established by Russian-born conductor Libi Lebel in 2000.
On July 30, the ensemble will release its second program on social media that will showcase Johannes Brahms’ “Academic Festival Overture,” a boisterous medley of student drinking songs that the composer wrote as a sarcastic gesture of appreciation for an honorary doctorate that the University of Breslau awarded him.
“For the vast majority of medical professionals, crisis times are even more isolating than usual,” Masko said. “Your day is consumed with procedure, planning and protocol, and there’s very little opportunity to unwind…Music has a profoundly positive effect on their mental health, and that effect becomes all the more profound when the circumstances go bad.”
The son of two physicians, Masko naturally developed an awareness of how the medical community operated. This proved advantageous when given his first opportunity to conduct a medical orchestra as an undergraduate student at Yale University. After earning his master’s degree in orchestral conducting at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, a dream to form such an ensemble topped his checklist and everything fell into place in his hometown of Providence, R.I.
Music, in fact, was an intrinsic part of many of the members’ lives long before medicine. Anderson’s relationship with the oboe traces back 50 years, and even now, as a pediatric epileptologist, the medical director of clinical neurophysiology at Texas Children’s Hospital and a clinician scientist at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, she continues to perform with the Texas Medical Center Orchestra and the Galveston Symphony.
While musical opportunities have dwindled in recent months, the stress of working in the medical field has multiplied.
“Knowing that we can come together and create beautiful music, even when socially distancing, is an amazing feat and totally rewarding,” Anderson said.
The opportunity to continue playing has proved equally meaningful for Roseborrough, whose career as an engineer-operator with the Houston Fire Department has also been greatly impacted by COVID-19. While the daily call volume is trending upward, firefighters are facing lengthening shifts as nearly 200 of them, at the time of this interview, are quarantined due to high-risk exposures, he said.
After receiving his doctorate in trumpet performance at the University of Miami, Roseborrough played with the Miami Symphony Orchestra before returning to Houston, where he had completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Houston, to work for the fire department. He joined the Texas Medical Center Orchestra in 2014, and now, he also serves as an adjunct professor at Texas Southern University.
“Music unites humanity; something in us loves music, needs music,” he said. “Continuing to create music during these weird, trying times reminds us all that there is light at the end of the tunnel.”