I was exposed to music at a very early age. This is because my
grandparents lived one floor below and played four–hand piano music
every day two hours in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. They
cataloged all the works played. The music was primarily classic, with a
heavy emphasis on Beethoven's symphonies and string quartets
(transcribed). Therefore the music which penetrated our apartment floor
was classical. My grandfather was profoundly musical although he had
very little organized training. Gradually I learned to differentiate
between various composers. The greatest thrill of my early youth, when
I was about 8 or 9 years old, was when I listened on a primitive radio
to a performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. I still remember the
exultation I felt.
I have written music since I was 6 or 7 years old, possibly stimulated
by my grandparents' daily playing the piano. I was encouraged to do so
by my mother who was an excellent singer, belonging to a chorus which
was primarily devoted to the music of Bach and his passions. This must
have been the stimulus which later induced me to compose church music.
When I was 8, I began to take piano lessons from a nice piano teacher
who worked with me until I reached a state where she felt that I would
be better off having lessons from a more experienced teacher. I then
transferred to the Conservatory and was accepted in the master class. I
had very little training in composition at the Conservatory, but I took
private lessons in harmony from a delightful teacher who lived in a
500–year–old house. He also introduced me to the music of Shostakovitch
and Hindemith.
Improvisation on the piano was my strength then and has remained a
source of enjoyment through my life. As a teenager, improvisation at
the grand piano in our music room gave me deep satisfaction and a state
of grace. The greatest difficulty in my early composing was to discover
that composing on paper is like slow motion molasses as compared to an
improvisation. Gradually, I learned to slow the pace of ideas so that I
could catch some on paper.
Why has the music been a necessity for me since my early youth? The
inspiration has come from the classics. When I listen to some of the
contemporary composers, I am astonished by the breakaway from the
classics. This itself is not objectionable, except when the break
signifies a total disdain for emotion. Rhythm and intellectualism alone
do not create great music.
Looking back, I must have been genetically afflicted with the desire to
write music but the soil in which I grew up made the little plant grow a
bit.
Relative to my love of medicine, when I was a research fellow in Denmark
in 1935, I worked on cell cultures, that is, cells growing outside the
body. At that time there happened to be a congress in biological
sciences in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize
winning experimental surgeon from the Rockefeller Institute in New York,
and his co–worker, Charles Lindbergh, the pilot (the first to fly from
the United States to France) attended. They had traveled to Copenhagen
to demonstrate their new invention, which was supposed to maintain life
of single organs outside the body. Since I spoke Danish, German and
English, they asked me to help them set up the equipment. Lindbergh and
Carrel then asked the director of the Carlsberg Laboratories to permit
me to spend a year at the Rockefeller Institute in New York to learn the
methods of "organ culture". In 1936, I was fortunate to receive a
fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.
After a stay at Seven Oaks, England, with the Lindberghs, I began my
studies under Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. This
experience motivated me to continue my work on the heart and
circulation. Later, after a year of internship at the Presbyterian
Hospital in New York city, I continued my training in renal and cardiac
physiology, amongst them at New York University and Bellevue Hospital.
Later I accepted a position as an assistant professor in medicine at the
Johns Hopkins Hospital working in the field of hypertension. After
serving in the US Army Medical Corp, I returned to Hopkins where I was
part of the team interested in surgical correction of children with
congenital heart disease. This was the final experience which directed
my career toward investigation and treatment of heart disease.
