Donor Spotlight: Joel Howell and Linda Samuelson

By UMS

Joel Howell and Linda Samuelson have lived in Ann Arbor since the early 1980s and are avid arts supporters in our community and beyond. A former UMS Board member, Joel is an emeritus professor of Medical History and Internal Medicine at the U-M Medical School and College of LSA. He is the founder of the Medical Arts Program, which uses the arts as a pathway to enhance medical students’ and house officers’ ability to provide high quality, humanistic clinical care by emphasizing essential but often overlooked skills such as empathy, awareness of social context, and comfort with ambiguity. Linda is a professor of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and Internal Medicine at U-M, researching the role of stem cells in the gastrointestinal tract.

Joel and Linda are supporting the upcoming concert of Philip Glass’s Complete Piano Etudes — a concert that has a personal connection for the couple. UMS Vice President of Marketing & Communications Sara Billmann sat down with Joel and Linda in March to talk about their connection to the arts, to UMS, and to Philip Glass.

UMS: Tell us a bit about how your interest in the arts began.

Joel: I grew up in Mississippi and started playing piano in sixth grade, but only after I promised my father that I would practice an hour each day. My father’s sister attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, so he had a good sense of what was required to be serious. I stopped taking lessons when I went to college. About 10 years ago Linda and I went to the piano sale at the Music School and bought a beautiful 1937 Steinway Grand. Shortly after, I began taking lessons again, with Joel Schoenhals, a professor of piano at EMU. It’s become a major part of my life.

Linda: I’m more of a listener than a player…I used to sing in the choir in high school, in East Lansing, but it was through Joel more than anything else that I became more seriously involved with the arts.

Joel, you grew up in Mississippi and Linda, you grew up in East Lansing. How did you meet?

Linda: We met each other when I was a freshman and he was a sophomore at Michigan State University and started seeing each other a couple of years later. Then Joel went off to the University of Chicago to go to medical school, and I joined him there and completed my PhD in microbiology.

We’ve been married a long time…50 years this year.

Congratulations! And you still seem to really like each other. I know how many concerts you go to each year, both here in Ann Arbor and in other cities. 50 years of marriage equals a lot of performances together.

Joel: When I was in medical school, my Great-Aunt Rose had season tickets to all three series of the Chicago Symphony. If it was raining, or snowing, or if Brahms was on the program, she gave us her tickets. Fifth row center, right there. Later, when I was in medical residency at the University of Chicago, we were able to use tickets donated by a grateful family member of a patient. He donated tickets for residents to attend Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Because Linda and I already had symphony tickets, we tended to go more for the opera.

Linda: That was when Joel and I first saw opera and fell in love with it.
That also at least partially explains what must have influenced you in developing the Medical Arts program.

Joel: Music can help learners become better doctors. One way is through careful listening. We have concerts for students at our house. Sometimes a soloist plays a piece for the students without telling them anything at all about the composition. We discuss their feelings, thoughts, reactions. And then, after telling them who wrote the piece, the context of the composition, perhaps what the composer intended, we listen to it again. Students always hear things differently the second time around.

Most students notice the wide dynamic range of live performances … so many of them spend their whole lives listening to MP3 files with dynamic compression and they just don’t appreciate the differences between loud and soft music — the sort of experience one gets listing to live music at a UMS concert.

Another goal of using the arts is to help student physicians learn to be more attuned to the nuances of a specific patient, not only to be more attentive to details but also to appreciate the importance of social context as well as to be more tolerant of ambiguity.

And how was it that you ended up back in Michigan?

Linda: I was living in Chicago finishing my PhD and Joel was living in Philadelphia finishing a fellowship. This was around 1981.

Joel: And we thought we would try a traditional marriage and live in the same city just to see how it would go. I was coming from hearing the Philadelphia Orchestra all the time, and Linda had the Chicago Symphony. We wondered if we would be able to hear great music in a small Midwestern college town. But when we saw the UMS calendar, we realized we didn’t have anything to worry about.

Ok, my favorite question, especially of people who have been attending our concerts for so many years: what are some of your strongest memories / favorite concerts?

Joel: Murray Perahia doing the Goldberg Variations … you start off with this incredibly simple melody that a halfway decent amateur pianist could easily play. And then you go on this wild trip, this elegant adventure, through all sorts of mind-boggling variations, and after more than an hour you come back to the same place you started, the same simple, elegant music. The silence in the house after that concert was just profound. I don’t know why, but I thank goodness nobody felt the urge to leap up and applaud instantly when it was over.

Linda: There was also the woman who substituted for Cecilia Bartoli – Ewa Podleś. What an amazing concert that was! [Editor’s note: Cecilia Bartoli had to cancel a long-awaited recital appearance in 1997, when she developed a respiratory infection two days before the concert. Polish contralto Ewa Podleś was a last-minute substitute.]

Joel: All of the Takács Quartet concerts…the elegance and beauty of their performances. And the first Royal Shakespeare series.

Linda: Oh my gosh, that was amazing. Wasn’t that amazing?

Joel: Another one was [Philip Glass’s] Einstein on the Beach…we saw it in both Ann Arbor and New York.

Which brings us back to Philip Glass…

Joel: Which brings us back to Philip Glass. Joel [Schoenfels] has studio recitals for his students. The next one is going to be the same day as the performance of the complete Philip Glass piano etudes. So I figured, what the hell? I’m going to play two or three of them for the studio recital that day, though certainly not anywhere near the level that we’re going to hear in Hill. Actually playing the pieces gives a whole new insight into Glass’s music. It can be somewhat hypnotic and transfixing, somewhat inspirational and always intense and immersive…playing that kind of repetitive motion over and over again with subtle changes, it’s not trivial. I’ll play numbers 1, 4, and 5, or possibly 1, 5, and 6. Not 100% sure.

That’s such an incredibly personal and meaningful connection to this concert. I always knew that you did a lot of preparation before attending concerts, but this is a pretty high bar!

Joel: I try to listen at least once to everything that’s going to be performed. I’ve always said that my ideal concert includes at least one piece that I know from beginning to end and at least one that I’ve never heard before. And very often that’s often what we get at UMS. UMS gives us the best chamber music and symphonic music in the world. We love getting series tickets because that gets us to concerts we wouldn’t choose otherwise.

Linda: Last year we went to Santa Fe Opera and loved it. The outside setting and the quality of the productions are inspirational. While we continue to hold season tickets to Lyric Opera, we’re also hoping to explore and go to Central City Opera in Colorado. This year Joel flew to New York to see Tristan and to San Francisco for Parsifal.

You travel for opera, but all of your other needs are met in Ann Arbor.

Joel: Exactly. I also think if you don’t go to a concert every now and then and hate it, then you’re not being open-minded, you’re not being aggressive enough, you’re missing some good stuff.

Linda: I think there’s a big gap between hating something and not really appreciating it.

Joel: Ok, yeah. I’ll go with not really appreciating.