She’d felt like this before. At scientific conferences, before giving a presentation, her stomach would begin twisting and turning and jumping and spinning, like Cirque du Soleil was putting on an impromptu show in her gut.
Dr. Kathy Moser could hear the audience file into their seats at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. From behind the curtain, she looked at the other half-dozen scientists who were participating in the OMRF Creativity Project and wondered if they were feeling it, too.
This night would be the culmination of a remarkable experience. Pathways in her brain that had lain fallow for many years had not only been reopened but tested and strained under the weight of a brand new pursuit: composing music for a string quartet in a mere 10 days. No matter that she’d never played a stringed instrument nor composed music. That was all part of the experiment. And as a medical researcher, she knew a thing or two about experiments. Except, usually, she was the one doing the experimenting.
The curtain drew back, and with it went her breath. An audience of hundreds sat waiting as a quartet from the Oklahoma City Philharmonic picked at their strings.
Moser knew her composition inside and out. She’d pieced it together note by note, heard its passages play in her head countless times. She’d even listened to the musicians rehearse the finished product. But opening night—the bright lights, the cameras, the crowd—had washed all that away. Now only her anxieties remained, and they dogged her with questions.
“Will my piece be any good?”
“Will the crowd like it?”
“Will I even be able to hear it over my heart thumping?”
Soon enough, she’d have her answers.
Months earlier, at a conference on creativity, OMRF President Stephen Prescott was pushing food around his plate, not terribly interested in the meal before him. Instead, his attention was focused on the man at the podium, Jerod Tate. An accomplished composer, Tate was telling how he taught his craft—to children.
The Oklahoma native and member of the Chickasaw Nation explained how he took the raw emotions and untuned ears of students and gave them the tools to compose beautiful music. The wheels in Prescott’s head began turning. The scientists at OMRF were some of the most imaginative people he’d ever encountered. But was their creativity transferable? If a mind could dream up a way to stop Alzheimer’s disease, could it also conjure up a sonata?
When Tate finished his presentation, Prescott took him aside. “Do you think you could do the same thing with scientists?”
“I don’t know,” said Tate. “But I’d love to find out.” And so was born the OMRF Creativity Project.
Tate signed on to lead the effort, and OMRF received a grant to fund the initiative from the Kirkpatrick Foundation. The Oklahoma Educational Television Authority also joined in, agreeing to film the project as an episode of its “State of Creativity” series. All that was left was to find a group of OMRF scientists willing to serve as musical guinea pigs.
Prescott issued a lunch invitation to a group of OMRF scientists he knew had at least a rudimentary background in music. But none had ever played a stringed instrument. And none knew about the experiment their boss was about to propose.
When the researchers entered the room, it was set for lunch, tables circled like wagons. At the front was a stranger with a long braid: Tate. Prescott introduced him and told the story of their meeting. Then he unveiled the plan: Anyone who chose to participate would take part in a 10-day musical “boot camp.” While continuing to run their scientific labs, the researchers would, under Tate’s tutelage, compose a piece for a string quartet. The project would culminate with a professional string quartet performing their compositions in front of a live audience.
“Okay,” Prescott asked the 10 researchers, “who’s in?”
“This experience, scary as it sounded, was so unique and so new, I didn’t want to pass it up,” Moser says. “So I told them I’d be thrilled and terrified to try.”
Moser was not the only one to say yes; six other OMRF researchers agreed to participate. Dr. Courtney Griffin had spent her formative years as a competitive pianist. Her husband, Dr. Tim Griffin, played the clarinet—until eighth grade. Dr. Jordan Tang had taught himself to play the piano. Dr. Courtney Montgomery had been a voice major in college until she opted for the sciences. Dr. Yasvir Tesiram noodles a bit on the guitar. And Dr. Luke Szweda tickled the ivories in his youth.
“There was a wide range of experience in the group,” says Tate. “But even after I’d only spent an hour with them, I could see that everyone who signed on was ready to embrace this challenge.”
Tate had taught scores of composition classes in his two-decade career. Orchestras across the land—including the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.—had performed his work. He’d received numerous accolades for his musical achievements.
Yet as the researchers shook his hand and said how much they were looking forward to the project, he could feel his pulse quickening, his mouth drying. “I’m used to teaching kids. But now I was going to be working with incredibly intelligent, high-achieving scientists. They were going to attack this project with the same intensity they use to try to understand cancer and heart disease.” Tate realized he was nervous. “I wondered if I was up to the task.”
But as he prepared for the OMRF project, Tate decided his nerves were a good sign. “You get a little jittery when you’re pushing yourself into new horizons. That’s good, though. Because new horizons are where the biggest discoveries lie.”
For Dr. Kathy Moser, the project offered a reprise of sorts. She’d begun playing the piano at the age of 4, and she quickly became a competitive performer. By the time she attended Bartlesville High School, she was not only performing but also teaching the instrument to others. As college approached, she had to decide whether she wanted to major in music and make a career out of teaching piano.
“I had to think long and hard about whether I could dedicate literally three or four years of my life to learning a 32-page piece of music, spending four or five hours a day at the keyboard,” says Moser. “And in the end, I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t see myself sitting on the bench for the rest of my life.”
After earning her undergraduate degree in microbiology, she took a job as a laboratory technician at OMRF. The hands-on experience of working with DNA gels, cell cultures and running experiments in the lab sparked a fire in Moser that never went out. She returned to school and received her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. In time, she found her way back to OMRF, where she now studies lupus and Sjo¨gren’s syndrome, “autoimmune” diseases in which the body turns its own defenses against itself.
Moser loves her work. But when Tate opened the door to her musical past, she decided to leap through. “Yes, I was scared. But when I thought about it, I asked myself, ‘When will I ever get an opportunity like this again?’”
On a gray Saturday morning this past spring, the seven scientists drove to the Post Oak Lodge in Tulsa to begin the project. Tate would lead an intensive two-day musical retreat. After stashing their bags, they found themselves in a rustic classroom with some very modern equipment. Tate was waiting for them with his keyboard and a stereo system.
Everyone was nervous for the beginning of the “master class,” as Tate called it. Fingers rapped expectantly on the wooden tables. Small talk ceased when the composer approached the front of the room and pressed play.
“AhWoooooooooooooooooooo!”
The students looked at each other after hearing the tell-tale wolf’s howl from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Closing his eyes, Tate swayed to the thumping bass line, then turned and began rocking out on air guitar.
“I want you to know, your compositions can be anything,” he said. “The only rule is that you have to write for a viola, two violins and a cello. Everything else is up to you.”
By the end of the first day, Moser’s head was spinning. Reality had sunk in. She would have to write a composition. Every note of it. Some of the other scientists had already begun writing. One had basically finished. Yet Moser had nothing. That night, she sat alone in her room and made a decision.
“A blank sheet of paper would not do,” she says. “I needed to get something down. That night. A melody or an idea or something. I could not go into the second day with nothing.”
It’s the kind of panic researchers get when a grant application is due, she says. The need to produce something is vital. No matter if it changes later. You have to start with a kernel, because that kernel will eventually grow into a full-fledged grant application. Without the grant, there’s no money to pay for supplies, equipment or salaries for technicians—and no science.
Moser paced around her room. She got out her laptop and went to YouTube to watch videos of different musical performances. Outside her door, she could hear the other scientists. They were talking, laughing, playing pool. Moser downloaded a keyboard simulator for her iPhone and started tinkering around. The voices of her fellow researchers quieted and then silenced as the clock passed midnight.
In those wee hours, Moser kept searching the Internet. Re-acquainting her fingers with her makeshift keyboard. She needed to find her own voice. Finally, she heard a note in her head. Then another. And she began to write.
By the following afternoon, she’d settled on a theme for her composition: a day in the life of her family. She’d start with the alarm going off, getting the children ready for school. There’d be music to represent each “movement” in the day—the coffee brewing, the kids scrambling to get out the door.
As she made this concoction, she’d slip in treats for each of them. For her daughter, Brianna, it would be a few bars of “You Are My Sunshine.” For her husband, Todd, it would be a Motley Crue song. There’d also be musical winks to her boys, Brandon and Blake.
By inserting slivers of their favorite songs, they’d understand the music belonged to them, too. This wouldn’t just be her song. It would be all of theirs.
The next day, Monday, Moser began her week of one-on-one classes with Tate. But OMRF is no musical sanctuary, and her days were still filled with science—running her laboratory, OMRF’s Sjo¨gren’s Syndrome Clinic and Lupus Family Registry and Repository. That left scant time to work on her composition.
“The workload was incredible,” she says. “Every night I was up past 2 or 3 a.m. writing, because I couldn’t walk into my meetings with Jerod empty-handed.”
Each day after lunch, she’d sit in a tiny alcove outside the OMRF cafeteria, headphones in her ears, fingering the keys on her keyboard simulator. She’d tap out tunes until she was satisfied, then transcribe her notes onto the page to bring to Tate, who’d set up shop in a conference room at OMRF. He’d spend an hour a day with each of his seven pupils, and the 1:00 slot belonged to Moser.
“What have you got?” he’d ask each afternoon when she’d arrive. He’d study what she’d penned in her notebook, then start peppering her with questions: Do you like this tempo? What are you trying to do with this passage? Before long, he’d scoot over to his keyboard, or begin decorating his dry erase board with her notes. As the week progressed, they sewed a rich tapestry from the scraps she brought him each day.
By Saturday morning, it was time to give the compositions to the string quartet. They would sight-read the pieces that, on Monday, they would perform for a live audience at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Moser invited her family to the rehearsal. Her two boys, ages 5 and 7, would be too young to sit through an entire concert, but she wanted all of them to hear what she’d written. She wanted them to hear their song.
As Todd, Brianna, Brandon and Blake listened to the string quartet play Kathy’s work, smiles crept across their faces. Except for Todd, whose mouth hung open—in awe, he’d later tell Kathy. That she’d created something so beautiful and complex had stunned him. It was, he says, like discovering his wife had a superpower.
Yet as Kathy sat by Tate, listening to the four musicians perform, she realized she still had work to do. The piece needed fine-tuning. Change a note here. Fix a rhythm there. Only two days remained to make it sound in her ears the way it sounded her head.
On the night of the concert, Kathy took a deep breath when it came time for the quartet to play her piece. The cello mimicked the rumble of her husband’s voice. The chittering of the violins arrived like her children awakening each morning. And there was Kathy, the viola in the middle of it all, keeping order.
When the music ended, applause filled the theater.
She’d done it. She’d taken a song that had played only in her mind and given it to the world. And in the process, she’d awakened something inside herself. “I thought I’d left music behind years ago, but when I jumped back into it, I felt that same deep connection like it was yesterday,” she says.
When the music ended, when the clapping gave way to silence, Kathy put her lab coat back on and returned to her work. There were autoimmune diseases that hadn’t seen new treatments in a half-century. And patients who desperately needed those treatments.
But when a spark rekindles, it doesn’t go out with the first breeze. For a long time, Kathy had been toying with purchasing a piano. After the concert, she went out and bought one. She’s now reworking her composition, so that she can play it with her own two hands.
In the meantime, every once in a while, when she needs a bit of inspiration, she’ll find the CD of the performance and pop it into her computer. Sometimes she’ll close her eyes, let the music wash over her. It only takes a few violin notes, and she’s back at the concert. To that night when she learned that some of the best experiments have nothing to do with laboratories.
