Pulse
Finding Harmony
Medicine anchors the life and music feeds the soul of family physician Stanley Woolner.
His long, tapered fingers poised over the keys, Stanley Woolner, M.D., glances across his grand piano toward the twinkling lights of downtown St. Paul, then turns to apologize for the broken E-flat. He begins to play. While his 4-year-old daughter Nadia twirls beside the piano bench, his music floods the bluff-top room with rich, dreamy sounds.
Music is far more than a casual hobby for Woolner, who is a family physician at Arcade Medical Clinic in St. Paul as well as both a pianist and a composer.
Since Woolner was a child, medicine and music have competed for his attention, and they continue to intertwine. The twists and turns of his adult life, not the least of which was the murder of his eldest daughter, Katherine, by her mother, have only deepened his devotion to his twin careers.
Woolner was 6 when he began playing the piano. Once he got past watered-down classics and beginner pieces, which he detested, he discovered that he loved the music of composers such as Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, and Moussorsky. Beethoven’s “Pathétique Sonata,” the works of early 20th century French composers and the music of Hector Villa-Lobos became favorites. Mostly, he loved composing his own pieces. “I’ve been passionate about music-writing since I was 9,” he says.
But his attraction to medicine has been equally strong. He remembers being afraid of living the impoverished life of a struggling musician and also not wanting to disappoint his parents, especially his father, a surgical pathologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. “It was a tug of war, since there are different ways of looking at a career,” he says. “I guess I ended up doing both.”
As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Woolner not only majored in biology but also took every music theory, orchestration, and composition course he could. He returned to Minneapolis, putting off medical school for four years while he taught high school math and science. He finally completed his medical degree at the University of Minnesota in 1990, playing when he could during medical school and his family medicine residency.
Mixing Music and Medicine
These days, the couch-somersaulting Nadia and her equally rambunctious brother, 18-month-old Abraham, make finding time for practicing and composing just as difficult. With his wife Sophea’s blessing, Woolner snatches time when he can: a few minutes before work, another few after bedtime stories. During lunch, he often plays in an empty church across the street from the clinic. Sometimes he calls his answering machine to sing notes he doesn’t want to forget for compositions he is working on.
Does he see parallels between his twin loves? Only in that both are demanding. Preparing for a concert in the early ’90s, he practiced so hard that he injured his right hand, which led him to compose four pieces for the left hand only. “Composing is extremely difficult. I often feel drained and self-assaultive when I feel that what I have written is no good,” he says. “I try to evoke something—a feeling, a visual image—and let it come through. It’s very intense. Then I ask, ‘Is it music? Does it make musical sense?’ Constructing a valid, cogent, coherent piece out of ideas is hard for me.”
Medicine, he says, reinforces the need for practicality, for something tangible. “You can feel good about doing good things, and success is easily identified. I like making a positive impact in people’s lives.”
He describes one patient, a Somali teenager who became withdrawn and incommunicative after his father left the family; the boy’s grades dropped and behavior issues emerged. Woolner questioned him about school and family, drawing him out, not letting him off the hook. Two years later, the young man is again doing well. “His mom saw me last week, and she told me he said about his turnaround, ‘I thank God and Dr. Woolner.’ Now that’ll make your week.”
While medicine grounds Woolner, music makes him euphoric. “When I feel like I’ve written something that is beautiful, I’m in ecstasy,” he says. And he feeds off the enthusiasm of those who have attended concerts featuring his music: “Their response is wonderful.”
Making Breakthroughs
When tragedy struck, music was a conduit for Woolner’s deep emotion. After Katherine was born to him and his first wife in the Netherlands, Woolner grew concerned about his then-wife’s abusive behavior. At his insistence, the Dutch police turned the child over to child protection services. Despite his repeated attempts to tell them what he had witnessed, child protection authorities returned the infant to her mother, from whom Woolner was separated. Just before her first birthday, on October 14, 1998, Katherine was suffocated by her mother, who later was convicted of murder and imprisoned.
Three weeks after Katherine’s death, a musical theme came to Woolner unbidden. Reminiscent of her tiny feet moving randomly as she lay on his chest, the theme haunted him. “That’s always the problem—knowing what to do with it, figuring out how to construct a viable piece. It’s like building a building. I sat on it for a couple of years. I thought it was worthless,” he says.
Eight years later, the 13-minute “Katherine on my Chest/with you at Your Grave” emerged. It’s a quiet, mesmerizing piece, the heaviness of sometimes dissonant bass chords offset by the lyrical high notes of the melody. When Woolner first played it for his composition teacher, Edie Hill, it was clear to both that this was a breakthrough. “When I was playing, she was nodding her head and moving in her chair. The fact that I was affecting another human being in this way really encouraged me,” says Woolner, who admits he fears boring his audience. But Hill urged him to stay with the theme. He did.
“It’s not like I was afraid of somebody rejecting it. I just didn’t think it was any good. But it must have been important to me because I felt very affirmed,” he says.
Woolner’s music bears his unmistakable thumbprint, says Hill. “One of the things I listen for is whether music is consistent in its own universe. His is—in the way he uses chord progressions and dissonances, in his facility and talent with line or melody. There are layers of melody, especially in the Katherine piece, voices carrying on, being passed in and out like several ribbons in a texture that is complex. But you can hear the melody come out,” she says. “When music is in the air, it speaks to you. Stan’s music speaks elegantly and very deeply.”
Woolner orchestrated the piece himself—a feat Hill calls a “very big leap” for him—and the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Orchestra performed it to much acclaim last March. Eight of Woolner’s compositions have also been performed during three Schubert Club concerts in St. Paul. He played two of the pieces himself; pianist Charles Scarborough played the Katherine piece. He recently released his first CD, a compilation of nine solo piano pieces he composed and recorded, but he has no intention of quitting his day job.
“Medicine gives you a certain level of satisfaction and structure. If I had to rely only on music for that—well, maybe I could, but it would be a risky business, and I don’t mean financially,” he says.
Yet music provides its own rewards. His 94-year-old father, not known for effusive praise, recently attended a concert featuring Woolner’s work. As he left, father looked at son and said, “Your music speaks to me.”
“That meant a lot,” Woolner says in his quiet way. The only thing that might mean more is achieving his next goal: hearing the Katherine piece performed in the Amsterdam Concert Hall.—Cathy Madison