The Med Center Orchestra - ‘Physicians by day, musicians by night’
/Microbiologist Lynn Zechiedrich took the stage at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2012 with dozens of other Houston-area medical professionals. Toward the end of the evening, she looked out at the audience, then lifted her flute to her lips to perform a solo.
“There were just tears of joy pouring down my face as I played those notes,” says Zechiedrich, a Buzz resident and a professor at Baylor College of Medicine, “and then the crowd jumps to their feet and erupts in applause.”
Zechiedrich is one of 80 members of the Texas Medical Center Orchestra, a group of doctors, nurses, medical students, scientists, dentists, therapists and researchers who’ve banded together to pursue their love of music and share it. They often arrive at weekly practices dressed in scrubs, and their orchestra is a much-needed creative outlet.
It’s also one of only a few U.S. community orchestras based in the medical community. For the last 20 years, the TMC orchestra has performed for patients and visitors in locations across the Texas Medical Center. Each year it gives four or five performances at prestigious concert halls. In 2017 and 2018, it won the American Prize for best community orchestra.
“I love these people – they’re like a family,” says Zechiedrich.
Zechiedrich began playing the flute as a child. She started in middle school, and won awards including All-State and All-American. Her dream was to play in an orchestra, but she also fell in love with science. During post-doc work, flute playing fell to the wayside, and after she moved to Houston in the late 1990s, she wasn’t even sure where her flute was.
But in 2000, while giving a lecture at TMC, she saw a poster advertising a doctors orchestra. She auditioned and was accepted into the fledgling group. “I was so excited to go to the first rehearsal,” Zechiedrich says.
To read the full article, visit The Buzz Magazines website.
