Music Man
Brian Kavanagh, MD, MPH, FASTRO
The Meyer House of San Francisco is an architectural marvel. Built in 1998 atop a hill overlooking the bay, the home’s centerpiece is a peak-ceilinged, walnut-floored salon floating above an enclosed open basement, so that sound inside resonates with an acoustic fidelity on a par with Carnegie Hall. Aptly named by the owner The Music Room, the space seats about sixty with room for three or four performers on strings and grand piano. It quickly became a popular venue for intimate recitals by the San Francisco Symphony stars and visiting virtuosos.
In 1999 Eugene Fodor enthralled an audience by playing Il Cannone, the instrument once owned by none other than Niccolo Paganini, the early 19th century Italian genius considered to be the greatest violinist of all time.
Soon the Meyer Chamber Music Series was a quarterly event, attracting the likes of Midori and Lang Lang and many other top tier talents. Between scheduled concerts were dozens of charity fundraisers and informal jam sessions featuring elite classical musicians from all over the world. A pre-Facebook word-of-mouth whisper network alerted those in the know about these impromptu get-togethers, and many times those without a ticket or reservation would be turned away for lack of standing room available in The Music Room.
The generous designer and owner of the Meyer House, John Meyer, is himself an accomplished violinist who grew up in a music-loving home. His mother was a piano teacher, and every day there was a line of students appearing every 30 minutes at the door. John was only seven years old when his dad started taking him to hear the Chicago Symphony’s concert series. Years later when he enrolled at UC Berkeley, John started as a music major and led a string quartet during his freshman and sophomore years.
Nearly every year from the 1990s to 2010s, there was a reception at the Meyer House for faculty lucky enough to be invited to speak at the San Francisco Radiation Oncology Conference. I should mention here that John’s side hustle is radiation oncology.
John Meyer, MD, FASTRO, completed his residency and radiobiology fellowship at Stanford and continued collaborative work there for years. He also joined the San Francisco private hospital based radiation oncology system with its academic residency, a program he soon led (adding its radiobiology laboratory), as well as its conference and book series. Throughout his career, he has always been as avid a patron of academics as he is a patron of the musical arts. For over 25 years, he was the Director of the San Francisco meeting that for a long time rivaled the ASTRO Annual Meeting as a premier forum for new science and open, occasionally spicy discussions among the top minds within the field.
Dr. Meyer reflected on his early engagement with the conference and its subsequent evolution:
“Jerry Vaeth asked me to work with him on the Symposium, which he had founded in 1965, just a handful of years after ASTRO itself began. The story of the SF conference is the story of radiotherapy itself. The yearly presentations expanded into chapters of Frontiers of Radiation Oncology. These were pioneering, practice changing times. Coming together, discussing and building together was essential to our progress - and everyone felt it. Conference attendance grew to over 600 radiation oncologists from around the world; we were often sold out.
“As we defined our roles in oncology practice, opinions were strongly felt and prospective trials were few. These made for some dramatic moments at the Symposium. As when an irate Gilbert Fletcher stood up in the audience, walked up to the podium and took the microphone away from the presenter from Mass General, and then proceeded to give the entire presentation the way he thought it should be presented.”
The regular San Francisco Conferences eventually melded with the annual educational meetings of the major universities in the region, but not before Karger published more than 30 textbooks from the conference proceedings. Many of these have served as highly informative references for trainees and practitioners over the years. Full disclosure: I personally owe John a debt of gratitude for helping to boost my career. He was kind enough to ask me to deliver a keynote at the 2005 conference, and he gave me license to present whatever information about SBRT I chose in whatever fashion I liked. No doubt this invitation is the one decision that haunts him from an otherwise unblemished run, but despite his likely immediate and lingering PTSD from that moment, nevertheless he graciously still allowed me to attend the reception, where I was transported to an ethereal realm as a trio playing traditional Chinese string instruments created other-worldly melodies, and the aural delight overtook my sensorium.
Dr. Meyer still plays the violin about two hours every day, at least thirty minutes of which is before he goes to work. He finds that music centers him. He is a member of the Napa Valley Chamber Orchestra and will soon join the Symphony Parnassus, which originated in 1965 as the Doctors’ Symphony of San Francisco. He sums up his philosophy about his two great passions and their interconnectedness as follow:
“I have always thought it important for people to congregate, to communicate in person. In medicine, to hear someone’s voice, giving emphasis to what is important to them. And likewise to hear music live. Over the years, creating opportunities for these sorts of moments has been an important theme for me, in both medicine and the arts.”
Take a bow, Dr. Meyer, to a well-earned standing ovation.
