The dementing process in my father’s brain was proceeding with the cold ineluctability of an invading army. Having figured his 80th birthday would most likely be his last, we planned a musical party. He loved music, caring naught for the artificial superimposition of genre. Driving together through the Napa Valley, he waxed rhapsodic about the beauty of the Mendelssohn piano sonatas we’d just heard and then asked, “Do you have ‘Walk Like An Egyptian’?” "Ach, ach, ach, Bruce,

Now I’m spending almost as much time in music as I am in medicine, I’ve noticed that the “degrees of separation” between me and others seem to have been reduced from a purported six to…well, about negative-one. Yes, there is the fostering of relationship when people play music together, but the connectionological power of music doesn’t stop there - it also manifests connections between people that existed before the actual playing of the instruments together. A couple of exam

I needed some 'irrational input' about some upcoming life decisions in January, 2008. Closely reasoned arguments were getting me nowhere. So I consulted a psychic. As I entered her incense-burning, jewel-bedecked psychic-atorium, she looked at me discerningly and said, ‘You’re a doctor…no, you’re a musician….no, a doc-,no, a musi-…wait, are you both?’ I affirmed her intuition in a sheepish tone, fearing that I was being somewhat disingenuous in representing myself as a musici