Arrhythmias bring needed breaks to busy med school students

Bishop, who received her master’s in choral from Brigham Young University, has led large and small ensembles through music both sacred and secular. Still, for all of her experience dealing with singers, Bishop admits that leading a choir of medical students posed its own challenges — and benefits.

“One of my favorite things about vocal coaching and teaching choirs is that you really need to know vocal pedagogy. A huge part of that relates to the anatomy of the voice,” said Bishop, who took over as the director of the Arrhythmias, the choir based on the Anschutz Medical Campus that features med students and their spouses. “I can mention the diaphragm or the larynx to these students … and they all understand exactly what I’m talking about. They’rereally brilliant, dedicated people. They’re very motivated. That makes it very fun.”

Organizing and conducting a choir is more than just fun for Bishop and her husband, Nick, a third-year medical/Ph.D student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. When Nick Bishop arrived at the campus to pursue his medical studies in 2009, rumors of a campus choir group stood out as a possible stress reliever, an outlet that could help defray the anxietyof medical school.

“When I was interviewing at the school, I told a lot of people that I was involved in choir. They told me a little bit about the Arrhythmias,” said Nick Bishop, who had sung in the choir before earning his undergraduate degree in physiology and developmental biology at Brigham Young University. “It was something that was really important for me. It helped alleviate my stress and kind of gave me an outlet while other things in my life were going crazy.”

When he learned that the choir at Anschutz had disbanded because the former student director hadn’t had enough time to handle the duties, he had the perfect candidate for a director to revive the Arrythmias.