Lucy Gellman Photo
At the end of a long day, at the beginning of a long week, nearing the longest night of what has felt like a long year, pulmonologist Lynn Tanoue was easing back into a tradition she had long missed, the now-familiar notes of Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia streaming forth from her violin.
From the bright stage at Harkness Auditorium, a varied Finnish landscape began to materialize: the sudden and striking old-new urbanity of Helsinki, Espoo, and Turku, punctuated rudely by a nationalism fit for artist Wäinö Aaltonen. Pastoral ebbs, conjuring mountains and still lakes, then the spray of northern lights that could bring listeners to their knees, sprang from the pages before her. Then nationalism again, angry and thrumming.
Tanoue played on, wrapped in the music.
Ken Yanagisawa raised his hands slowly. Tanoue and her colleagues stilled. No beepers beeped. No cell phones rang. A rarity for 50 professionals at Yale’s Medical School: no emergencies were bringing them offstage.
“You all sound amazing,” he said, grinning.
Yanagisawa was addressing the Yale Medical Symphony Orchestra (YMSO), a group of around 50 doctors, researchers, translators, postdocs, and current students from Yale University’s medical campus that congregate every Thursday to practice, and were hard at work this past Monday for a special rehearsal. Supported by the Yale School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital, the all-volunteer orchestra will present its annual winter concert at 7:30 p.m. Friday night at Harkness Auditorium on Cedar Street. Admission is free.
“There’s a lot of conjecture on why these [medicine and music] go together,” said Tanoue, who founded the group in January 2008 after a chance conversation with Lisa Wong of the Longwood Medical Symphony in Boston. “I think many people who end up in science or medicine have the same kind of motivation it takes to excel at a musical instrument.”
“It must have been meant to be,” she added, “because it has spiraled into what it is now.”
That meant-to-be-ness was on full display at the group’s rehearsal earlier this week, where members traded their white coats and scrubs for string, wind, and brass instruments, unzipping heavy cases and picking up the tools of their trade with surgical precision. In New Haven, Tanoue said, there aren’t many opportunities for amateur musicians, and especially not for amateur musicians who can’t always make practices because they are on call, or away lecturing. The orchestra has been an answer to that; it has done Hadasa Hospital-style flash mobs at the Smilow Cancer Center and plays three free concerts per year.
“It adds to the richness of the fabric of the school. For people who live in the medical center, it gives them an avenue to express their artistry in a very different way,” Tanoue said.
That’s driven by a sense of intergenerational and interdisciplinary collaboration that members treasure. Marc Mann, a violist in internal medicine, found himself talking to a cardiologist-violinist about a patient they were both treating. In the cello section, a medical student and a translator traded weekly music tips. Tanoue, who knows the specialties of every musician in the group, sometimes ends up leading rounds with students she’s met first at their music stands.
“These relationships extend way beyond the life of the medical school,” she said.
“It’s pretty amazing, seeing who is in the orchestra,” said Music Director Robert Smith III, who has taken the position as a chance to mentor conducting students like Yanagisawa, a music major who graduates from Yale next spring. “It’s a great way for students to work with professors and residents.”
As a conductor, he added, it helps that the group comprises people “who strive for perfection.” The air tingled with it Monday night, as members transitioned from Sibelius’s epic ode to Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 in D Major, a piece so profoundly set in the calmness of Pörtschach am Wörthersee, where it was composed, that any remnants of Finnish pride banished themselves clear from the room. A deep, dizzying sway took center stage. Everything shifted to pastoral bliss. A slow build, and then a tremble of violins cut to the end, finishing with a just-so-slight abruptness.
Smith smiled. “Let’s do it one more time.”