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QuickTake:
James Murdock was a piano prodigy as a child, and even as medical school, family and a heavy workload as a doctor later kept him busy, he never stopped playing.
Two black grand pianos, a Bechstein and a Steinway, sit in the Murdock family’s vaulted-ceiling living room in south Eugene.
That’s because, Marilyn Murdock said, “I had four people practicing, and one piano just wasn’t enough.”
Her husband, Dr. James Murdock, a respected surgeon whose patients and nurses spoke of him with something close to reverence, was the one of the four. And he was the one who taught the family’s three daughters to play.
Murdock died Oct. 18 at 88.
“I remember so many times we’d be getting out of the car in a parking garage, and somebody would come up and wrap their arms around him,” Marilyn Murdock said. “They’d say, ‘Dr. Murdock, you saved my daughter’s life.’”
A prodigy who became a surgeon
James Murdock grew up in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. His mother, who was a piano performance major at Northwestern University, was his first teacher. He was a child prodigy, Marilyn Murdock said, and studied with top teachers in St. Louis before attending Washington University for both college and medical school.
He stopped taking piano lessons in college, his wife said, believing a doctor wouldn’t need them.
“But he didn’t drop piano,” she said
He accompanied the glee club and student shows, and in medical school he found a coach, Harold Zabrack. As a junior, he played Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with the St. Louis Symphony while dealing with a full load of medical school classes.
His classmate Dennis Collis, who started medical school with him in 1959, remembers a man who seemed to do everything. Murdock ranked at or near the top of his class, swam for Washington University and helped win an intramural basketball title.
Even years later, Collis said, Murdock practiced piano three to four hours a day. The dean of medicine once called him out for dropping from first to second in his medical school class.
“You’re not taking your studies seriously,” Marilyn Murdock recalled the dean saying.
Two years in France, and a trip to Berlin
After a surgical internship and a year of residency at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, Murdock joined the Air Force as a captain. He and Marilyn, who married in 1963, were sent to Pont-à-Mousson, a village in Lorraine, in northeastern France. It was the Vietnam era; he got his vaccines and was ready to get shipped out to Vietnam. But it didn’t happen.
He kept playing piano through it all.
A friend of the Murdocks arranged lessons with Magda Tagliaferro, a renowned Brazilian-French pianist who taught at the Paris Conservatory. For more than a year, the couple traveled to Paris monthly. Tagliaferro thought he was good enough for the Salzburg Music Festival, but he declined, knowing they were headed home to the United States soon.
A life in Oregon
The Murdocks had never been to Oregon when he accepted an opening in the surgical program at Oregon Health & Science University.
After two years in Portland, they settled in Eugene, where he joined a private practice. All three of the Murdocks’ daughters — Lynn, Elizabeth and Katie — were born at in Eugene.
He worked long days, so on Wednesday nights his wife and the girls brought dinner to the hospital. At home, he taught each daughter piano.
“How many people do you know whose piano teacher stands on the balcony with a bath towel wrapped around him, saying that’s an A-flat in the left hand?” Elizabeth liked to joke, according to Marilyn.
The family skied together at Snowbird, in Utah, and drove there singing, telling stories and listening to Richard Wagner. At Christmas, he and the girls played and sang before services at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church.
He retired because of atrial fibrillation, which Marilyn Murdock said felt like “a washing machine inside.”
For him, retiring meant leaving medicine entirely. He grew roses and learned to ride horses in his 50s alongside Marilyn, who raised Arabian horses. They took ballroom dancing lessons, too.
He was, Marilyn said with a chuckle, a better pianist than dancer.
Giving back to the community
The Murdocks helped start the St. Mary’s Episcopal Church Saturday breakfast program for people experiencing homelessness about 25 years ago. They gave to the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, first funding a piano scholarship, then a $1 million gift that helped launch the school’s $15 million scholarship campaign.
“I think Jim and Marilyn are both very humble people,” said Sabrina Madison-Cannon, the dean of the school. Neither was inclined to seek public credit for the $1 million gift, but school officials wanted to publicize it, “so that we could inspire others to follow in their footsteps,” Madison-Cannon said.
With UO professor of piano Alexandre Dossin, who met the Murdocks through St. Mary’s, the Murdocks also helped found the Oregon Piano Institute in 2024, a private organization separate from the university.
This October, the Institute held its first Murdock International Piano Competition, Dossin said, though James Murdock was too ill to attend. When Dossin visited him afterward, Murdock asked who had won the competition. It was Seongwoo Moon of South Korea.
Music stayed with Murdock as other things faded, Madison-Cannon said.
Madison-Cannon recalled a dinner with Murdock, about two years ago. His hearing and memory were failing, but he played a Rachmaninoff piece “with so much vigor.”
“Even as you’re fading in so many other ways, there was this piece of him that was still in there,” she said. “Burning like a fire.”
Murdock was generous in other ways, too. When Madison-Cannon faced a serious health crisis, the long-retired surgeon called to talk it through.
“It wasn’t about the school or school business,” Madison-Cannon said. “He wanted to talk to me about me and my health.”
Dossin said he never saw Murdock without a spark in his eyes. On his last visit, after the inaugural competition, the spark was gone. “I knew the end was close,” he said.
Marilyn Murdock brought a plaque from the competition to his hospital bed.
“He read it, and he said, ‘Did it really happen?’” she said. “I said, ‘It really happened. We did it.’ He said, ‘Did we do it?’ I said, ‘We did it.’”
