Watch the first ever performance by the National Virtual Medical Orchestra
"Even in the darkest times...we can come together and make music and feel,” said founder and director John Masko.
Fighting the coronavirus pandemic has brought medical professionals across the country together in unexpected ways—one of them is performing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4.
The National Virtual Medical Orchestra (NVMO) is an ensemble made up of 50 doctors, nurses, first responders, and medical students from medical orchestras across the country. Some of the orchestra’s musicians are helping to lead the response to the coronavirus, while others have had their specialties virtually shut down by the pandemic. Six of their musicians are members of Boston’s Longwood Symphony Orchestra, which was one of the first major health care community orchestras, and two play with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in Newton.
The NVMO was founded in May by John Masko, the musical director of the Providence Medical Orchestra in Rhode Island. His hope was to bring together a talented community that has generally remained fragmented in recent months, and to provide an opportunity for people to connect in a new way.
“For any orchestra, medical or not, it’s pretty obvious we couldn’t rehearse anything anymore; [we] couldn’t perform. Everybody started lying fallow,” said Masko. “And I tried to start thinking about what are the actual opportunities here that we might not have gotten to pursue under normal circumstances?”
Each member of the new orchestra recorded their own part of the group’s first performance — a movement from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. Masko had an audio and video producer mix the recordings together, and the final product premiered Wednesday on the NVMO Youtube channel.
“[Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4] has a sort of warm feeling, tone, that we believe the Virtual Medical Orchestra should represent. It also has a motive in it, which appears all throughout this movement, which is a heartbeat,” said Masko. “It sounds sort of like that bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum, and we actually thought, thematically, that would be perfect. It symbolizes a still beating heart that goes through the entire piece and is triumphant at the end.”
Masko hopes the NVMO’s performance to be the first of many. He says that the orchestra already has musicians who want to be involved, but didn’t fit into the instrumentation needed for their first performance.
“I think we’re hoping to spread hope with this ensemble,” said Masko. “It’s a group that shows that even in the darkest times — and this is a group of people that have had some pretty dark times over the last couple of months — we can come together and make music and feel.”
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