printable versionLearning to listen: connections between music and medicine
BY TONYA CLAYTON
The St. Lawrence String Quartet will perform 5 p.m., Monday, at Fairchild Auditorium, with a talk by National Public Radio commentator Robert Kapilow, for the event, “Music and medicine: The art of listening.”
An unusual scene greeted the 80 or so first-year medical students filing into Fairchild Auditorium for a January afternoon class on the practice of medicine. With nary a PowerPoint slide or stethoscope in sight, a world-famous string quartet sat up front, tuning instruments. And one bespectacled fellow with apparently boundless energy happily encouraged everyone forward towards front-row seats.
Accomplished musicians are unusually common among medical students. Yet the general air on that blustery day was one of skepticism: "What's going on here?"
And that's just the way the bespectacled fellow—composer and classical music commentator Rob Kapilow—likes it. Skepticism is what excites him in an audience.
Before long, he and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Stanford's ensemble-in-residence, had the audience of doctors and doctors-in-training enthusiastically clapping and tapping to strains of Franz Joseph Haydn—and thinking deeply about active listening in medicine and music.
"Within minutes it was clear that Kapilow's method of parsing what was happening in a musical phrase could be a metaphor for how we parse—how we're sort of prejudiced to anticipate certain things we're going to be hearing," said anesthesiologist Audrey Shafer, MD, codirector of the Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities scholars' track. "I was just blown away. Kapilow is one of the most incredible educators I've ever seen."
On Monday, Kapilow, a regular commentator on National Public Radio, will return to team up again with the St. Lawrence String Quartet at the School of Medicine. The event, "Music and medicine: The art of listening" is free and open to the public and will examine "communication, teamwork, focus and the human condition." The interactive concert and lecture begins at 5 p.m. in Fairchild Auditorium.
Kapilow described big plans for Monday's audience: "Talk, demonstration, discuss, clap, tap, sing and then listen." No medical or musical background is required.
"We're going to have a conversation with a piece of music, with the string quartet," Kapilow said. The "listening" theme was inspired in part by his and the quartet's visit to a Stanford first-year medical class last fall, in which students were learning to conduct patient interviews through role playing—in other words, learning to listen.
Kapilow also observed that a string quartet offers a platform for exploring notions of teamwork, hierarchy and technical language—all relevant to the practice of medicine as well as to music. The quartet, he explained, is "the perfect, non-hierarchical, democratic team."
The Kapilow-quartet collaboration has been going on for about 10 years. Monday's performance is sponsored by the Arts, Humanities and Medicine Program of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, but its lessons are relevant to others as well as doctors and musicians.
Quartet violinist Barry Shiffman remarked: "If you can listen properly and hear properly, then you're open to the necessary information to affect change in somebody's life, be it medical or personal. The obvious, immediate benefit is serving your patients better, but it's much wider than that. It's exploring this idea of listening and how on the surface something looks and sounds one way but on deeper examination—through active listening—a number of stories and messages you didn't hear on your first listening are suddenly obvious.
"And then the beautiful part of this is, even if you get none of that, hopefully you'll enjoy a nice afternoon of music: There's no admission charge, you're not getting graded, there's no homework."
Said Kapilow: "It will be fun. That's really the goal of it."
For more information, contact Audrey Shafer at ashafer@stanford.edu.