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High-Achieving MDs and PhDs Find Harmony in Orchestra
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"It's very physical, and you're basically moving all parts of your body and coordinating it with the music, and it's significantly different than any other kind of work that I do," Marvin said.
For Marcia Tollefson, music is the ultimate escape. She was diagnosed with breast cancer eight years ago and is a patient at NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
Tollefson, 51, had been practicing to sing a mezzo solo at tonight's concert, but she said she dropped out because of health challenges. She might sing next season.
"I have suffered with so many chronic and life-threatening illnesses that I could either sit back and cry or have something that gives me a focus, that gives me a reason to keep putting A to B to C to D," she said. "As long as I keep learning -- and there is so much to learn in music -- I'm living."
Singing in the orchestra is a way for Tollefson to become part of a community at the hospital where she receives care. Since NIH built a security fence around its Bethesda campus a few years ago, nearby residents have felt blocked out.
"With our fence, we feel kind of cut off," Siegel said. "Now we have NIH people outside the fence playing with other people side-by-side, so it's a nice way to break down the barriers within the community."
Not long after the NIH Philharmonia was founded in 2005, D'Alimonte, a doctor of musical arts -- not medicine -- said it struck her that she was leading an unusual orchestra. The group was performing a Haydn symphony, and she paused to tell the audience a story about the composer.
"I said, 'When Haydn was buried, two medical students decapitated and stole his head. They wanted to study the bumps on his head. The head was not returned to the body until over 100 years later. It was lost in some medical cabinet,' " D'Alimonte recalled.
"I turned back and said, 'So that's what you people do at NIH.' "
After the concert, a violinist came up to D'Alimonte and said, "Oh, I'm studying mouse ears for deafness."
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