Nora Yip, MD '00, recently performed with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Here, she's inside the National Theatre of Costa Rica in San Jose, Costa Rica.
Alumna Performs at Buffalo Orchestra Concert
By Keith Gillogly
Published January 23, 2025
Nora Yip, MD ’00, became a surgeon because she wanted to help patients while using her hands. Those same hands that deftly perform complex operations, laparoscopic surgeries, and other procedures also play beautiful music.
A violinist since fourth grade, Yip has performed with orchestras large and small at concert halls near and far, from Rochester to Costa Rica. Recently, she took the stage alongside members of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra as part of a Doctors of the World benefit concert at Kleinhans Music Hall.
The Nov. 6 performance welcomed physicians from across the U.S. and the world, connecting local and international communities through music while raising funds for Oishei Children’s Hospital’s Healing Arts Program. “To come back to play music with other musician-doctors from all over the world was very alluring,” Yip recalls. “We’re literally trading our white coats for black concert attire.”
Yip is currently a colorectal surgeon at St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany, New York. On any given day, she’s conducting surgical operations and treating patients with colon cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, fistulas, and many other conditions.
But in the weeks leading up to a musical performance, she’s especially busy, sometimes waking at 5 a.m. to rehearse, or squeezing in a midnight practice session. Trying to master some 32 pages of sheet music before a big show can be daunting, Yip admits, but the joy of music motivates her.
“There are many doctors who are far more accomplished and talented musically than I am,” Yip says with a laugh. “But I just like to participate for the joy of music and appreciation of music and also the challenge of learning these spectacular pieces.”
From the Operating Theater to the Symphony Stage
The operating room is sometimes called the operating theater — a setting, Yip says, that is perhaps not so different from the orchestral stage. The anesthesiologists, surgeons, surgical techs, and OR nurses coordinate care, just as the violins, cellos, woodwinds, brass, and percussion perform in symphony.
As with doing surgery, playing the violin requires technical expertise. “The violin is, I would say, technically challenging as well,” Yip says. “For the pieces that we played, I had to really try to master everything about my part, which was the fingering, the bowing, the dynamics.”
Yip grew up near Rochester and came to the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences after earning her undergraduate degree at Cornell University. While she took some time off from playing violin during her early surgical career and during her residency training at the University of Connecticut, she’s now a regular performer.
In 2022, Yip played her first concert with the World Doctors Orchestra (WDO), an international group of over 2,000 doctors who perform benefit concerts worldwide, in Anguilla in the Caribbean. After a fellow medical school alum introduced Yip to the WDO, she later learned that one of its members had Buffalo roots. This connection led to Yip performing with the BPO this past November.
Class of 2000 Celebrates 25 Years
At Kleinhans, Yip and the BPO played Offenbach’s Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 27. The thrilling evening, Yip says, also had great audience turnout.
In attendance was David M. Holmes, MD, clinical associate professor of family medicine at the Jacobs School. Holmes was Yip’s preceptor during her third-year family medicine practice rotation and, Yip says, he’s been a longtime mentor and role model.
“I try to emulate his humble attitude in my own practice," she says of Holmes. “From him, I learned being a great physician encompasses not just clinical knowledge and skill but also the ability to understand how all facets of a patient’s life circumstances affect their health.”
While in Buffalo, Yip took a tour, led by Holmes, of the Jacobs School’s new downtown facility. She also visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (“a true gem both inside and out!” Yip proclaims).
This year, Yip and the Class of 2000 are celebrating their 25-year medical school graduation anniversary. Looking back, Yip says that her medical school education laid the foundation for her surgical career, and she fondly recalls her experience at UB. “I greatly appreciate and am grateful for my time at UB,” she says. “It was both remarkable and memorable.”