Musicians and surgeons learning from one another? Surely no two worlds could be further apart. Yet maybe not as far as you think, as our collaboration on The World of Surgery at this week’s Cheltenham Music Festival aims to show. One of us (Roger Kneebone) is a surgeon who studies how surgeons teach and learn. The other (Aaron Williamon) is a musician who studies how musicians prepare and perform. We’ve been working together for several years, discovering unexpected parallels between our fields of research.
Because once you start thinking about it, music and surgery have a lot in common. Surgeons