April 5, 2014

The Art of Listening
Daniel Adams, age twenty-six, started playing the viola at the age of eleven at his elementary school in South Florida. He later studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Cleveland Institute of Music’s “Young Artist Program,” and the Juilliard School as a student in the Columbia-Juilliard combined program, where he also studied socio-cultural anthropology and was on the ski team. Danny currently studies the viola privately with Heidi Castleman. A third-year medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Danny is pursuing a dual career in music and psychiatry.

In the past year, cellist Hamilton Berry has performed with Decoda, Ensemble ACJW, A Far Cry, and The Con Brio Ensemble. He has also collaborated with rock bands including Vampire Weekend, Fun, and Cults. A Nashville native, he received his Master’s from Juilliard in 2009, as a student of Timothy Eddy.

 

Dr. Daniel Caplivski is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Co-course Director of the Medical Microbiology Course at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He studied history and literature at Harvard and then went on to the Yale School of Medicine before completing his postgraduate training in internal medicine and infectious diseases at Mount Sinai. Dr. Caplivski is an avid musician and enjoys playing trumpet with the New York Repertory Orchestra and the Louis Bauzo orchestra, a sixteen-piece salsa band.

Before attending University of Miami, Matt Chertkoff studied privately with Josh Breakstone and Gene Bertoncini at Eastman’s summer program. Upon graduation from University of Miami with a jazz guitar degree, Matt immersed himself in the city’s vibrant music scene. He subsequently moved to New York to concentrate on jazz. Matt has performed or recorded with Fathead Newman, Grady Tate, Curtis Lundy, Bobby Forrester, Vanessa Rubin, Cecil Brooks, Bernie Worrell, Percy Sledge, and Lester Chambers, and he has appeared on international TV shows on Telemundo and Nippon networks.

Sean Conly has performed or recorded with noted artists such as Gregory Tardy, Freddie Hubbard, Regina Carter, Ray Barretto, and many, many others. In addition, he has released several award-winning recordings with his group Re:Action (on Clean Feed), with Tony Malaby, Michael Attias, and Pheeroan Aklaff; the duo Think Shadow (on Outnow recordings) with Michael Attias; and as part of the collective GrassRoots (on Aum Fidelity), with Darius Jones, Chad Taylor, and Alex Harding. Sean teaches at the Musician’s Collective.

Brian Floody was born in New York City in 1971 and lives in Brooklyn. Brian has performed with many instrumentalists, including the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, and he has accompanied such vocalists as Antonia Bennett, Norah Jones, Marlena Shaw, and Naomi Shelton. He was co-founder and artistic director of the Emory University Jazz Festival. He is currently on the faculty of the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and the Church Street School for Music and Art. Among his recent performances is the smash hit “I Learned the Hard Way,” with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.

Originally from San Diego, violinist Alex Fortes holds degrees from Harvard and Mannes College. Recent orchestral and chamber music performances have included engagements in Denmark, Austria, and Indonesia as well as throughout the United States with groups such as the Franklin and Momenta string quartets, the Talea Ensemble, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Future In REverse (FIRE), the String Orchestra of New York City, and A Far Cry.

Dr. Suzanne Garfinkle is the founding director of Mount Sinai’s Academy for Medicine and the Humanities. A psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of children and adolescents, Dr. Garfinkle graduated from Amherst College with a degree in English. She earned an MSc from University College London in Theoretical Psychoanalysis before matriculating at Mount Sinai School of Medicine via the Humanities and Medicine program. She completed a residency in psychiatry at Columbia Presbyterian / New York State Psychiatric Institute and a fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Mount Sinai. Her honors and awards include the Ginsberg and PRITE fellowships. She delivered the honorary Bretler grand rounds at North Shore–Long Island Jewish hospital in 2012 on “Best Practices in Medical Humanities Education.”

Violinist Chris Lin-Brande is from Reno, Nevada, and attended Yale
University, where he was concertmaster of the Yale Symphony Orchestra. He is currently a third-year medical student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

 

 

Dr. Michael Tosi began playing the clarinet at the age of nine. For the last several years he has participated in a week-long summer chamber music program at Vermont Music and Arts Center in Lyndonville, Vermont, and he has given several chamber music performances in recent years both in Vermont and in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as an ad hoc member of Serenata of Santa Fe. He is currently interim chief of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Music and the Mind
Dr. Richard Kogan is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and Artistic Director of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Program. Dr. Kogan is renowned for his lecture-recitals that explore the role of music in healing and the influence of psychological factors and psychiatric and medical illness on the creative output of composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, and Bernstein. He has given presentations at music festivals, concert series, medical conferences, and scholarly symposia worldwide. His recent lectures include “The Power of Music in Healing Mind and Body” presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and a lecture earlier this year at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi, India, on music’s therapeutic impact.
 Dr. Kogan has won numerous honors, including the Concert Artists Guild Award and the Liebert Award for Applied Psychoanalysis. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music Pre-college, Harvard College, and Harvard Medical School. He completed a psychiatry residency and an academic fellowship at NYU. He is Co-director of the Human Sexuality Program at the Weill Cornell Medical College and has a private practice of psychiatry in New York City.

BALL & Other Funny Stories About Cancer
Brian Lobel is a New York–born, London-based performer who creates work in a range of spaces and contexts, from cabarets to medical schools, galleries to forests, marketplaces to theatres. His trilogy of works related to cancer, entitled BALL & Other Funny Stories About Cancer, has been shown in hundreds of venues internationally and was published by Oberon in 2012. A double DVD collection of his live work related to illness (entitled CANCER CANCER CANCER CANCER CANCER) has been released by Live Art Development Agency. Brian is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at University of Chichester and an Artistic Associate for Performing Medicine (London). He is the recipient of numerous grants and commissions, including a Wellcome Trust Arts Award for his recent installation Fun with Cancer Patients, a collaboration with the Birmingham Teenage Cancer Trust. For more information: http://www.blobelwarming.com

Reading Bodies: Dance for PD®
David Leventhal is a founding teacher and Program Director for Dance for PD®, a collaborative program of the Mark Morris Dance Group and Brooklyn Parkinson Group that has been used as a model for classes in more than a hundred communities in ten countries. He leads classes around the world for people with Parkinson’s disease and trains other teachers in the Dance for PD® approach. Along with Olie Westheimer, he is the co-recipient of the 2013 Alan Bonander Humanitarian Award from the Parkinson’s Unity Walk. He has written about dance and Parkinson’s for such publications as Dance Gazette and Room 217, and two recently published books, Moving Ideas: Multimodal Learning in Communities and Schools (Peter Lang), and Creating Dance: A Traveler’s Guide (Hampton Press) include chapters he has written about the program. He has spoken about the intersection of dance, Parkinson’s, and healthcare at University of Michigan, Brown University, and Columbia University, and he serves on the Board of Directors of the Global Alliance for Arts and Health. As a dancer, he performed with the Mark Morris Dance Group from 1997–2011, appearing in principal roles in Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, and Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare. He received a 2010 Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award) for his performing career with Mark Morris. He graduated from Brown University with honors in English Literature.

Pamela Quinn danced professionally for twenty years with ODC/San Francisco and with actor-writer Michael O’Connor before she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of forty-two. Since then she has used her extensive movement background, along with her personal experience of the disease, to investigate and create movement therapy for people with Parkinson’s. Her innovative approach has gained wide recognition and she is avidly sought after as a teacher in the PD community throughout the U.S. Quinn founded Movement Lab for the Brooklyn Parkinson Group, for whom she teaches regularly, and she also teaches in NYU’s Wellness program sponsored by the Safra Foundation in collaboration with the JCC, and at Beth Israel, in addition to working with individual clients. She has been featured on the CBS Evening News, published in Neurology Now and Dance Magazine, and was invited to present her work at the last two World Parkinson Congresses, where she won first prize for her video, “Welcome to our World.” She also appeared in the film A Late Quartet, for which she was a consultant for Christopher Walken, who played a musician with PD. She is a teacher, a dancer, a choreographer, a patient, a writer, a speaker, a PD advocate, and a mom. She lives with her husband and two children in Manhattan.

Discussion Panel: Performing Medicine
Dr. Danielle Ofri writes regularly for the New York Times about medicine and the doctor-patient relationship. Her most recent book is What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine (Beacon Press, 2013). Dr. Ofri is an internist at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the country, and an Associate Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. She is also the author of three more books about life in medicine are Medicine in Translation, Incidental Findings, and Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue (Beacon Press, 2010, 2004, and 2003).

Lisa O’Sullivan, PhD., is Director of the Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine. She trained as a cultural and medical historian and received her doctorate from Queen Mary University of London in 2006. Between 2003 and 2011 she was Senior Curator of Medicine at the Science Museum London, where she curated the Wellcome collection, one of the world’s preeminent historic medical collections. She was Head of Research for the Wellcome Trust-funded Brought to Life website highlighting the global reach of the Wellcome and Science Museum’s medical collections. Responsible for issues relating to human remains and culturally sensitive materials in the collections, she led the Science Museum’s repatriation work.

String Quartet: Music and Medicine Initiative 
at Weill Cornell Medical College
Violist Michael Alas, a native of the Philippines, has degrees in romance languages and premedical studies from Wagner College and viola performance from the Purchase College Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Ira Weller. He has played in performances across the globe from Alaska to New Zealand, from Carnegie Hall to breaking cultural ground and touring all over Asia with the Manhattan Symphonie. Equally at home in the emergency room and on the concert stage, Michael is currently pursuing postbaccalaureate medical studies at Columbia University, is a Research Associate at New York Presbyterian–Weill Cornell, and a pit violist for the Westchester Broadway Theatre’s current production of Titanic.

Laura Belland, a daughter of two professional musicians, grew up surrounded by classical music. She began musical studies at age six in the Suzuki Violin Program at the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. She studied privately with Kiki Bussell and Michael Klotz, spending summers at the Interlochen Arts Camp, Wyoming String Camp, and NKU Norse Festival. In adolescence, Laura served as Principle Second of the Cincinnati Junior Strings and of the Cincinnati Symphony Youth Orchestra. She continued violin studies at The Ohio State University, graduating in 2008 with a Bachelor of Science in microbiology and French and a minor in music performance. From 2008 to 2010 she completed a research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, where she was a member of the NIH Philharmonic Orchestra. Since beginning her medical education at Mount Sinai in 2010, Laura co-founded Sinai’s Music and Medicine Seminar Series and co-led Sinai Arts. She has been a member of Weill Cornell’s Music and Medicine Orchestra, The New York Symphonic Arts Ensemble, and Musica Bella Orchestra of New York.

Stefanie Gerstberger, violin, is a PhD student at Rockefeller University. She began playing the violin at age six and studied most recently under Professor Wolfgang Miessen at the Music Conservatory Frankfurt am Main. She won the regional first prize in the German national competition “Jugend musiziert” at age eight, played in the Youth State Orchestra Hessia, at national master classes, and as guest performer with the Cologne City Youth Orchestra on TV. During her undergraduate studies in chemistry at Oxford University she founded the Pembroke string quartet, played in the Oxford Symphony Orchestra, and performed in accompanying string ensembles at master classes, musicals, and official receptions. Chamber music is her passion, and she performs regularly in various string ensembles. She is a member of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine initiative and has performed regularly in their concerts, chamber music events, and Christmas caroling. Stefanie’s university studies include research of the compositional contrapunctus of RNA processing.

Amy Kwon began playing cello at age eight and most recently studied with Christopher Costanza of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. She has performed with Broadway star John Arthur Greene (Matilda) at the Metropolitan Room and with Rob Kapilow on his classical music program What Makes It Great?^® She has been a featured soloist with the Portland, Oregon, band Pink Martini and a guest performer on Chinese Central Television in Beijing. Her recent awards include the Stanford Humanities and Sciences Undergraduate Prize in Music for Cello Performance (2007) and the Stanford Friends of Music Chamber Music Award (2010). As student co-chair of the Music and Medicine Initiative, Amy helps organize activities supporting the musical interests of professionals at Weill Cornell Medical College and the tri-institutional community of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York–Presbyterian Hospital, and the Hospital for Special Surgery. She founded a community-based chamber music recital series at New York–Presbyterian Hospital in 2013.