Harmonic Treatment by Chester Lane
from SymphonyNow published by the League of American Orchestras
The Longwood Symphony Orchestra is no ordinary ensemble. It takes its name from “the main street of the Boston medical district where many of our players have their ‘day jobs,’ ” writes Dr. Lisa Wong in Scales to Scalpels: Doctors Who Practice the Healing Arts of Music and Medicine (Pegasus Books, 284 pages, $27.95). Many of those players’ stories are captured movingly in the book, which was written in collaboration with Robert Viagas, a veteran New York-based book author and former manager of Playbill.com and theatre.com. Scales to Scalpels is also a personal memoir and a wide-ranging survey of how music and medicine complement each other.
Dr. Wong, an associate in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School with a private practice in the Boston suburbs, is a longtime member of the LSO violin section and has served as board president since the time of the orchestra’s first benefit event—a 1991 “Reverence for Life” concert in support of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. This spring she stepped down from the presidency after twenty years of service. On June 6, at the League Conference in Dallas, she will join Michelle Kaebisch, director of education and community engagement at the Madison Symphony Orchestra, and music therapist Laurie Farnan in a panel session called “Harmonic Treatment: Promoting Healing, Health & Wellness through Music.”
The publication of Scales to Scalpels this spring was timed for the 30th anniversary of the Longwood Symphony’s founding in 1982, although Wong writes in the book’s Coda that she first joined the orchestra in 1985 when the group was “barely two years old.” (As she told SymphonyNOW this spring, “chamber-music performances in the Longwood area were bubbling up for a couple of years before an orchestra really coalesced” under the guiding hand of two chaplains at New England Deaconess Hospital, Rev. Dr. Guy Steele Sr. and Rev. Charles Kessler. The LSO’s actual incorporation dates from 1986.) In our recent conversation she talked about her future plans for integrating music and medicine, about what makes the Longwood Symphony special, and about how its mission and mode of operations might serve as a model for other orchestras.
Dr. Wong took the viola part for this LSO chamber concert at Sherrill House Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.
Chester Lane: How did you come to write Scales to Scalpels?
Lisa Wong: I had always thought the stories of Longwood Symphony Orchestra musicians were so interesting that I wanted to share them. A number of years ago I was approached by Harvard Health Publications to write a sort of how-to book about what music could do to be helpful in the health field. I came back to them with the idea of a broader story. Music can heal on so many levels, not only for patients but for the musicians themselves. Harvard Health Publications is not really a publisher; they opened the door for me to go to Pegasus and work with Robert Viagas, who is quite a writer on his own. We spent hours together interviewing the different characters in the book. He was able to create vignettes of these different doctors and make them sparkle on the page.
Lane: You cover a lot of ground in the book, not just in writing about the Longwood Symphony but about your own personal story and the whole topic of music and health.
Wong: It’s quite a broad brush. The book went through many iterations. And I’ve asked myself, should I have focused more on this or on that? But I think each area informs the other. It’s really about the different things that I’m interested in. It’s been fun.
Stephen C. Wright, M.D., Longwood Symphony Orchestra bassoonist and co-chair of the LSO Board of Directors
Lane: How applicable is the mission of the Longwood Symphony to other orchestras that are not made up of medical professionals and students? Are there things that a regular orchestra could do?
Wong: Absolutely. The medical school and the music conservatory are not dissimilar. Both have young, very talented and specialized students who come to the school bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to save the world through their music and through their medicine. By the time they get out they are a little more world-weary, maybe a little jaded and concerned about their careers; their idealism may be a little bit dampened. That’s something that we don’t want to have happen. The opportunity to play for something beyond yourself, or to care for patients, is a way to maintain that idealism. That translates to the larger orchestra world. All orchestras want these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young people. If there are ways to tap into their wanting to give back, that helps on two levels: the orchestra becomes more engaged with its community, and the idealism of the musicians is revitalized.
“If you dig a little into each orchestra you’ll find musicians who are working with the Boys & Girls Club, or have had breast cancer and are now walking for the Susan G. Komen organization. There’s always something that they’re doing beyond sitting on the stage and playing. It takes a little developing, finding out about who the orchestra is and how it fits into the community.”
Lane: The Longwood Symphony is an all-volunteer orchestra, isn’t it?
Wong: The musicians aren’t paid, but we do pay the music director, the soloists, the staff, and we pay for the concert hall. We have many of the usual fixed costs of an orchestra. And all of the LSO’s concerts are benefit concerts [with a designated charity/community partner], but they are structured so that the orchestra isn’t losing money. While we’re giving away a third of the house at a discount, we have enough income to cover expenses. With many benefit concerts at other orchestras, the entire burden is on the orchestra to sell the tickets and give the money to a beneficiary organization. That’s not our model—we found that that didn’t engage the community partner as much. We offer them advice, consulting, connections, and we work with them on creating the event that works perfectly for them. They then build their own donor base, which they can go back to later. So we’re teaching them to get their message out and continue with their own fundraising. And that has broadened our connections. I still have relationships with organizations we worked with twenty years ago.
But this is not so different from what other orchestras could do. If you dig a little into each orchestra you’ll find musicians who are working with the Boys & Girls Club, or have had breast cancer and are now walking for the Susan G. Komen organization. There’s always something that they’re doing beyond sitting on the stage and playing. It takes a little developing, finding out about who the orchestra is and how it fits into the community.
Longwood Symphony oboist Michael Barnett, M.D., a medical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and co-vice-chair of the LSO Board of Directors
Lane: Longwood players work at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Children’s Hospital Boston, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Harvard Medical School. Milton Pediatric is your own practice, and you’re also affiliated with Harvard?
Wong: Yes, we all have Harvard appointments, and we have students and residents who come out to our practice and we teach them. Once in a while it turns out that these Harvard students are members of the Longwood Symphony. There’s such an overlap between the student body and the orchestra.
Lane: You continue to play in the orchestra, but you just stepped down as president.
Wong: Yes. We have our first executive director, Lisa Bryington Barr, who is a graduate of the League’s Orchestra Management Fellowship Program. We’re very proud to have her. As president I was effectively doing a lot of the executive director work, and she’ll pick that up. We’re eliminating the post of board president, but Drs. Mark Gebhardt and Stephen Wright are staying on as co-chairs. We’ll be strengthening our staff. The board structure will be more standard, with a chair and committees.
I’ll be working on some larger projects. El Sistema is the big movement now. I’ve been working with Mark Churchill at New England Conservatory on El Sistema USA. I got involved in El Sistema long ago in Venezuela, and as soon as I set foot there I thought, “There’s an answer here to some of the questions I’ve been asking all my life.” It pulled in my pediatric side, my education side. And then to come back a couple of years ago to find that some of the El Sistema graduates are now becoming doctors and dentists …
Lane: When did you first experience El Sistema in Venezuela?
Wong: In 2001. I’ve been down there five times, and each time saw it from a different perspective. The first two times I went as the parent of a violist in Ben Zander’s New England Conservatory Youth Philharmonic. The first of these students was my older daughter, Jennifer Chang (who later went on to study at Harvard and write her thesis about El Sistema Venezuela; this spring she got her master’s degree at Juilliard). Four years later I went with my son Christopher Chang. I was the pediatric chaperone for both trips. The 2001 visit was very intense—it was the first time our students and their students played side-by-side. I was lucky to be in the circle where I could speak directly with [El Sistema founder Dr. José Antonio] Abreu. He’s brilliant: he has a medical team that belongs to El Sistema. They have about seven pediatricians. At every major rehearsal that has more than 100 kids they have a doctor there just in case anything happens. And on one of the bus rides I had a chance to go through my medical kit and compare it to his!
My fourth trip to Venezuela was with Yo-Yo Ma and Carlos Prieto, who went down to give masterclasses for 500 cellists. Yo-Yo was there asking Dr. Abreu the hard questions, and I could be a fly on the wall. The next time I went with my husband, violinist Lynn Chang, who was there as a chamber music coach. That was very interesting: they are beginning to branch out from orchestras to chamber music and have to learn to listen in a different way.
For my next trip I’m hoping to study El Sistema’s disabilities program more extensively. On one of my previous visits I saw a young blind trumpet player who was playing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. I asked him, “How do you follow the music? Do you use one hand to read the Braille and the other to play the trumpet?” And he said, “No, you memorize the entire thing. Your friends sort of nudge you and you know when to come in.” There are people in the Harvard Ed School working on disabilities and the arts. The hope is that next year we will go down to Venezuela and work on that.
My other hope is to talk to Dr. Abreu about starting a “Longwood Symphony” there. The El Sistema musicians finish when they are about 25. They are very sad, because they don’t have that orchestra that was part of their social life and childhood. So who knows, maybe one day there will be lots of doctors’ orchestras down there too.
The Longwood Symphony Orchestra at Boston’s Jordan Hall. “Playing in that hallowed space inspired us all to push ourselves to play better in order to be worthy of it, and it still does,” writes Dr. Lisa Wong in “Scales to Scalpels.”
http://www.symphonynow.org/2012/06/harmonic-treatment/
from SymphonyNow published by the League of American Orchestras
The Longwood Symphony Orchestra is no ordinary ensemble. It takes its name from “the main street of the Boston medical district where many of our players have their ‘day jobs,’ ” writes Dr. Lisa Wong in Scales to Scalpels: Doctors Who Practice the Healing Arts of Music and Medicine (Pegasus Books, 284 pages, $27.95). Many of those players’ stories are captured movingly in the book, which was written in collaboration with Robert Viagas, a veteran New York-based book author and former manager of Playbill.com and theatre.com. Scales to Scalpels is also a personal memoir and a wide-ranging survey of how music and medicine complement each other.
Dr. Wong, an associate in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School with a private practice in the Boston suburbs, is a longtime member of the LSO violin section and has served as board president since the time of the orchestra’s first benefit event—a 1991 “Reverence for Life” concert in support of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. This spring she stepped down from the presidency after twenty years of service. On June 6, at the League Conference in Dallas, she will join Michelle Kaebisch, director of education and community engagement at the Madison Symphony Orchestra, and music therapist Laurie Farnan in a panel session called “Harmonic Treatment: Promoting Healing, Health & Wellness through Music.”
The publication of Scales to Scalpels this spring was timed for the 30th anniversary of the Longwood Symphony’s founding in 1982, although Wong writes in the book’s Coda that she first joined the orchestra in 1985 when the group was “barely two years old.” (As she told SymphonyNOW this spring, “chamber-music performances in the Longwood area were bubbling up for a couple of years before an orchestra really coalesced” under the guiding hand of two chaplains at New England Deaconess Hospital, Rev. Dr. Guy Steele Sr. and Rev. Charles Kessler. The LSO’s actual incorporation dates from 1986.) In our recent conversation she talked about her future plans for integrating music and medicine, about what makes the Longwood Symphony special, and about how its mission and mode of operations might serve as a model for other orchestras.
Dr. Wong took the viola part for this LSO chamber concert at Sherrill House Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.
Chester Lane: How did you come to write Scales to Scalpels?
Lisa Wong: I had always thought the stories of Longwood Symphony Orchestra musicians were so interesting that I wanted to share them. A number of years ago I was approached by Harvard Health Publications to write a sort of how-to book about what music could do to be helpful in the health field. I came back to them with the idea of a broader story. Music can heal on so many levels, not only for patients but for the musicians themselves. Harvard Health Publications is not really a publisher; they opened the door for me to go to Pegasus and work with Robert Viagas, who is quite a writer on his own. We spent hours together interviewing the different characters in the book. He was able to create vignettes of these different doctors and make them sparkle on the page.
Lane: You cover a lot of ground in the book, not just in writing about the Longwood Symphony but about your own personal story and the whole topic of music and health.
Wong: It’s quite a broad brush. The book went through many iterations. And I’ve asked myself, should I have focused more on this or on that? But I think each area informs the other. It’s really about the different things that I’m interested in. It’s been fun.
Stephen C. Wright, M.D., Longwood Symphony Orchestra bassoonist and co-chair of the LSO Board of Directors
Lane: How applicable is the mission of the Longwood Symphony to other orchestras that are not made up of medical professionals and students? Are there things that a regular orchestra could do?
Wong: Absolutely. The medical school and the music conservatory are not dissimilar. Both have young, very talented and specialized students who come to the school bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to save the world through their music and through their medicine. By the time they get out they are a little more world-weary, maybe a little jaded and concerned about their careers; their idealism may be a little bit dampened. That’s something that we don’t want to have happen. The opportunity to play for something beyond yourself, or to care for patients, is a way to maintain that idealism. That translates to the larger orchestra world. All orchestras want these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young people. If there are ways to tap into their wanting to give back, that helps on two levels: the orchestra becomes more engaged with its community, and the idealism of the musicians is revitalized.
“If you dig a little into each orchestra you’ll find musicians who are working with the Boys & Girls Club, or have had breast cancer and are now walking for the Susan G. Komen organization. There’s always something that they’re doing beyond sitting on the stage and playing. It takes a little developing, finding out about who the orchestra is and how it fits into the community.”
Lane: The Longwood Symphony is an all-volunteer orchestra, isn’t it?
Wong: The musicians aren’t paid, but we do pay the music director, the soloists, the staff, and we pay for the concert hall. We have many of the usual fixed costs of an orchestra. And all of the LSO’s concerts are benefit concerts [with a designated charity/community partner], but they are structured so that the orchestra isn’t losing money. While we’re giving away a third of the house at a discount, we have enough income to cover expenses. With many benefit concerts at other orchestras, the entire burden is on the orchestra to sell the tickets and give the money to a beneficiary organization. That’s not our model—we found that that didn’t engage the community partner as much. We offer them advice, consulting, connections, and we work with them on creating the event that works perfectly for them. They then build their own donor base, which they can go back to later. So we’re teaching them to get their message out and continue with their own fundraising. And that has broadened our connections. I still have relationships with organizations we worked with twenty years ago.
But this is not so different from what other orchestras could do. If you dig a little into each orchestra you’ll find musicians who are working with the Boys & Girls Club, or have had breast cancer and are now walking for the Susan G. Komen organization. There’s always something that they’re doing beyond sitting on the stage and playing. It takes a little developing, finding out about who the orchestra is and how it fits into the community.
Longwood Symphony oboist Michael Barnett, M.D., a medical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and co-vice-chair of the LSO Board of Directors
Lane: Longwood players work at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Children’s Hospital Boston, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Harvard Medical School. Milton Pediatric is your own practice, and you’re also affiliated with Harvard?
Wong: Yes, we all have Harvard appointments, and we have students and residents who come out to our practice and we teach them. Once in a while it turns out that these Harvard students are members of the Longwood Symphony. There’s such an overlap between the student body and the orchestra.
Lane: You continue to play in the orchestra, but you just stepped down as president.
Wong: Yes. We have our first executive director, Lisa Bryington Barr, who is a graduate of the League’s Orchestra Management Fellowship Program. We’re very proud to have her. As president I was effectively doing a lot of the executive director work, and she’ll pick that up. We’re eliminating the post of board president, but Drs. Mark Gebhardt and Stephen Wright are staying on as co-chairs. We’ll be strengthening our staff. The board structure will be more standard, with a chair and committees.
I’ll be working on some larger projects. El Sistema is the big movement now. I’ve been working with Mark Churchill at New England Conservatory on El Sistema USA. I got involved in El Sistema long ago in Venezuela, and as soon as I set foot there I thought, “There’s an answer here to some of the questions I’ve been asking all my life.” It pulled in my pediatric side, my education side. And then to come back a couple of years ago to find that some of the El Sistema graduates are now becoming doctors and dentists …
Lane: When did you first experience El Sistema in Venezuela?
Wong: In 2001. I’ve been down there five times, and each time saw it from a different perspective. The first two times I went as the parent of a violist in Ben Zander’s New England Conservatory Youth Philharmonic. The first of these students was my older daughter, Jennifer Chang (who later went on to study at Harvard and write her thesis about El Sistema Venezuela; this spring she got her master’s degree at Juilliard). Four years later I went with my son Christopher Chang. I was the pediatric chaperone for both trips. The 2001 visit was very intense—it was the first time our students and their students played side-by-side. I was lucky to be in the circle where I could speak directly with [El Sistema founder Dr. José Antonio] Abreu. He’s brilliant: he has a medical team that belongs to El Sistema. They have about seven pediatricians. At every major rehearsal that has more than 100 kids they have a doctor there just in case anything happens. And on one of the bus rides I had a chance to go through my medical kit and compare it to his!
My fourth trip to Venezuela was with Yo-Yo Ma and Carlos Prieto, who went down to give masterclasses for 500 cellists. Yo-Yo was there asking Dr. Abreu the hard questions, and I could be a fly on the wall. The next time I went with my husband, violinist Lynn Chang, who was there as a chamber music coach. That was very interesting: they are beginning to branch out from orchestras to chamber music and have to learn to listen in a different way.
For my next trip I’m hoping to study El Sistema’s disabilities program more extensively. On one of my previous visits I saw a young blind trumpet player who was playing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. I asked him, “How do you follow the music? Do you use one hand to read the Braille and the other to play the trumpet?” And he said, “No, you memorize the entire thing. Your friends sort of nudge you and you know when to come in.” There are people in the Harvard Ed School working on disabilities and the arts. The hope is that next year we will go down to Venezuela and work on that.
My other hope is to talk to Dr. Abreu about starting a “Longwood Symphony” there. The El Sistema musicians finish when they are about 25. They are very sad, because they don’t have that orchestra that was part of their social life and childhood. So who knows, maybe one day there will be lots of doctors’ orchestras down there too.
The Longwood Symphony Orchestra at Boston’s Jordan Hall. “Playing in that hallowed space inspired us all to push ourselves to play better in order to be worthy of it, and it still does,” writes Dr. Lisa Wong in “Scales to Scalpels.”
http://www.symphonynow.org/2012/06/harmonic-treatment/
