Connecting the Dots Between Doctors and Composers

Connecting the Dots Between Doctors and Composers

Doctors and composers seemingly have very different career paths; one is creative and insecure while the other is technical and more lucrative. But when we peel back the layers, we reveal that these two career fields aren’t so opposite. Especially when we’re talking about writing music, they have quite a lot of overlap in terms of motivation, skill set, and outcome of their work. Today we’re going to be walking through each of these facets and diving into why I think doctors would make fantastic composers. It starts with how we stack our deck.

Stacking the deck is a term used to describe the advantages you have. Taking advantage of your advantages, if you will. Doctors have stacked their deck a certain way to be successful. Composers have stacked their deck to make them successful. They are two different decks. But if you’re a doctor, some of your cards transfer nicely into your music deck. The first card being, what motivates you.

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Doctors’ and Composers’ Motivation

People go into music, and people go into medicine, for largely the same reason. We are fulfilled by work that has an impact that is bigger than ourselves. What we do will outlive our lifetime. As a composer, I write music that I hope be played long after I’m dead, and make people feel more alive. Doctors are in the business of saving lives, too; quite literally. At the end of the day, we both want people to have a more fulfilled, happier life because of the work that we do. And there is quite a large overlap between the emotional and social aspects of helping sick patients and communicating emotion to others through music.

As a doctor who might want to write music, lean into that motivation; give it space to live in the piece you could compose. This characteristic can be useful both in the operating room, and in the studio.

Researched facts

In my research, I came across the World Doctors Orchestra. This is an orchestra made up entirely of doctors. But there’s not just one orchestra; there’s dozens, everywhere. New York. Los Angeles. London. All over the world, there are symphonies being played by people whose day job is being a doctor. These orchestras don’t exist for every profession, which I think is a testament to just how similar doctors and musicians are.

Lisa Wong, the President of the Doctors Orchestra in New York City, says, “The music we create builds in us an emotional strength, sense of identity, and sense of order. Then it is given away—we play for others, we play in ensembles. We come to medicine and it is the same thing. The giving, the service—in music and medicine—is a natural connection.”

Being alive—and being sick—is experienced as unpleasant, but also miraculous. That miraculousness—and the privilege of doctors and musicians being part of it— is beautiful, in and of itself.

But beauty is not at the forefront of a doctor’s career. Danielle Ofri says, “It is a glorious relief, instead, to struggle for—and occasionally achieve—precisely the right note. But then, there is a step even beyond that. The note doesn’t have to merely be right—it also has to be beautiful. Beauty is not something that gets much shrift in medicine.”

Fueling

What fuels you to be a doctor can fuel you to be a composer, but it doesn’t stop there. You can’t be fulfilled as a doctor doing beautiful things—and that difference right there is what will separate you and the music you write. It’s the piece of the puzzle that would make a doctor’s concerto different from a normal musician’s. “Beautiful” is in my job description (sometimes, depending on the circumstance. Sometimes I’m supposed to write ugly stuff). It isn’t such a treat for me. But for a doctor, who is trained to do things the most efficient way but not necessarily the prettiest way, their perspective on beauty in music is not the same as mine. Savor that, and make it shine through your piece.

The Skill

This is where the conversation gets a little more practical. We spend so much of our lives building skills that will advance us in our career. We buy books, we take lessons, we watch and observe and listen to others, we receive the formal education, we do everything we can to try to be the best we possibly can be. There’s also the factors of natural talent and personality and characteristics that we’re born with and privilege with our upbringing, I mean we can go so deep with this. But this is true for both doctors and musicians. You are born with a knack for certain things, and then you spend your life trying to hone those skills, and develop the ones that you lack.

And you might think to yourself…Elisha. I have spent the past 20 years of my life devoting myself to the medical field. I’ve gone to medical school, trained to be a doctor, and practiced medicine. I don’t want to throw all that away to write music.

Well, you don’t have to.

A real-world example

The skills you’ve built as a doctor are the skills I have built as a composer, we just use these skills in very different ways. Are you hearing me? Doctors and composers share similar soft skills. I think this is something best demonstrated by one of my students, who is a medical researcher. She’s actually been working on the COVID vaccine, so shoutout to her and all her wonderful work!

In our lessons, she draws connections between her lab work and her piano work. She recognizes patterns, and runs with ideas. True education is not learning standalone facts. It’s the way you apply the knowledge, and how you learned how to learn it, if that makes sense. If I send her a link to demonstrate a music theory concept, she comes back the next week understanding everything I learned in my freshman music theory class. It’s because she realizes that she’s not starting over trying to learn something brand new, she’s taking what she knows how to do well, and applying it to her hobby. My job as her teacher is to help her recognize the similarities and accelerate her learning, yes, but there’s something more, that most people usually forget about.

While we have some characteristics that are the same, we also have some that are different, and that’s not a bad thing.. And as a teacher, it is my job to guide these differences to make them an advantage; to make the student stand out against anyone else.

Learned vs natural skills

But there’s another layer here too. We’ve been talking about your learned skills, and how they’re either the same or different between doctors and composers, but there are natural skills at play here too; genetic differences between us. Your natural instincts are different than mine as a composer. And that is another thing you can use to your advantage.

When I compose, a lot of times musical ideas will just come to me, unexplained, and I can’t exactly analyze why I like them or want to use them. But the best composers in the world have written music that we can analyze—and do analyze, in great detail— in music theory classes. Utilize that fact as a doctor. Capitalize on your talent for systematic order and attention to detail. When you write music, one of the most attractive things about your piece will be its structure and order. There’s a reason that the music from the classical time period is so popular. If you can tap into this, you’ve given yourself a leg up against whimsical creatives like me.

The End Result

What we hope to acquire in the end is similar for doctors and composers. This ties closely to our motivation, which we talked about earlier. At the end of the day, after you’ve seen all your patients and all your appointments are done, what do you hope to have accomplished? What do you hope you HAVEN’T done? As a musician, my goal is to make people feel deep emotion, to draw out pieces of themselves that they haven’t seen in awhile, to make them feel more alive. But as a composer, my job feels bigger than that. Not only do I hope that they feel something, but I hope that it challenges them. I hope to write notes that stimulate their brain, make them view the world in a slightly different way. I don’t care what they’re doing with their life; I just care that it’s intentional and fulfilled.

Doctors hope to achieve the same thing; their end result is a patient who lives longer. It’s difficult to live with pain, it’s difficult to live with sickness, it’s difficult to live with sadness. They want to make their patients quality of life better. That’s what I want, too.

If you’re a doctor who has been thinking about writing music, do it. Just try it. You can’t fail; the risk is low, you aren’t going to kill someone because of what you write. If you’ve been thinking about writing music, I’d love to work with you. Contact me now to set something up. I have a passion for teaching others to use their unique skillset, in whatever profession they’re in, to make themselves the best songwriters they can be.