A Life in Two Keys
Dan Brownstone on Music, Medicine, and Leading the ISO
Ask Dan Brownstone what shaped him, and he doesn't start with medical school. He starts with soirées in Los Angeles, where his parents' friends would gather around a piano and someone would sit down and start playing ragtime.
Brownstone's father played viola, his mother violin. They met, married, and raised three sons, all of them musicians. When Dan's turn came at age six, he broke from the family string tradition. “I said, I don't want to do another string instrument,” he recalls. “My mom said, well, we have a piano. What about that?”
It didn't take right away. Young Dan preferred football to practicing, and he tested his parents by sitting down at the keys for exactly five minutes before walking off. To their credit, they never pushed. They just kept paying for lessons and waited.
By 13, something shifted. He got serious, then very serious, eventually enrolling in the USC School of Music as a piano performance major. That's where his plans changed course. “I discovered I was not the only one who wanted to become a concert pianist,” he says. Thirteen highly capable pianists shared his year alone. Faced with a future that looked more like teaching than performing, Brownstone transferred to UC Berkeley to study microbiology.
Medicine found him almost by accident. His older brother, on his way to becoming a neurologist, told him to look into it. “Whatever you do, don't become a neurologist,” his brother said, “but there's lots of things you can do in medicine that are fun.” That conversation pointed Brownstone toward ophthalmology, and toward the 38-year career that would make him one of Central Illinois's most respected eye surgeons.
Music, meanwhile, sat untouched for years, a casualty of medical school, residency, and building a practice. It wasn't until 1995, after Brownstone and his wife Deborah moved to Bloomington, that his mother shipped his piano out to them. She had a hunch he might finally have room, and time, for it again.
She was right. Not long after, Brownstone found his way to Doctors in Concert, the community benefit now known as Music as Medicine, and he's performed in nearly every one since. This year's concert, on October 25th at the BCPA Ballroom, will find him playing the final two movements of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Baba Yaga and The Great Gate of Kiev. By coincidence, the ISO performs the same piece the following week. “I'm sure I'll be pale by comparison,” he laughs, “but it's one guy doing it, so that has to count for something.”
Brownstone traces a real connection between his two disciplines. “The physical aspect is fine motor control, which is what piano is all about, as is microsurgery,” he says. But the deeper link, he believes, is in how music trained him to learn: with discipline, and with a tolerance for the slow, unglamorous work of getting better. “That continuous process of improving that music forces you to do, I continue to use throughout my medical career.”
It was two ISO connections, Carole Ringer and John Wohlwend, who first drew Brownstone onto the board, after meeting him through Doctors in Concert. He arrived, by his own admission, with little idea what the role required. Twelve or thirteen years later, he's serving his current term as Board President.
Under his watch, the ISO has pursued a clear ambition: to become the premier professional orchestra in Central Illinois, competitive not just artistically but in what it can offer its musicians. That means raising musician pay to compete with Peoria and Champaign, and bringing in Music Director, Taichi Fukumura, whose post as Associate Conductor at the Cleveland Symphony has started drawing attention from artists who want to play with the ISO on their way to bigger stages.
Brownstone is candid about what stands in the way: money. “This day and age, corporate giving is becoming smaller and smaller,” he says. “Individual donors have to step in and build the gap.” It's why, over the past year, he's pushed hard on Board Governance: a strategic plan, a new onboarding and mentoring process for board members, and a more robust board giving campaign. He also championed a national search for a new development director, a hire he calls one of the best decisions the board has made recently.
Ask him what he'd say to someone who's never heard the ISO play, and Brownstone doesn't lead with obligation. He leads with value. He points out that a top ticket in Bloomington runs a fraction of what the same seat costs in Chicago, without the parking or the hotel. “It's world class,” he says. “Why do that? Just come right here.”
His hopes for the next five to ten years center on the ISO's endowment, which he'd like to see grow from roughly $2 million to $5–7 million. The return on that larger fund would ease the pressure of annual fundraising, not eliminate it, but give the organization steadier footing to weather whatever challenges come up rather than scrambling each time one does. It's part of a broader vision that also includes bringing the ISO to Ravinia's summer series, producing a recording, and continuing to champion new works by Illinois composers.
For Brownstone, the throughline between the piano and the podium, the operating room and the boardroom, is the same one his parents modeled for him at six years old: show up, put in the work, and trust that it adds up to something worth hearing.