Ivan Shulman is an award winning conductor, teacher, clinician and virtuoso performer, who has appeared with many orchestras in the Southern California area. In addition to his position as Music Director of the Los Angeles Doctors Symphony Orchestra, he is on the music faculty of California State University at Long Beach, and the Music Advisory Board of the Young Musicians Foundation. He has played oboe with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on tour, as well as at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and at the Hollywood Bowl. For several years, he served as tour physician with the Philharmonic, going to Mexico with Erich Leinsdorf, to Japan and Korea with Carlo Maria Giulini, and to Europe with Zubin Mehta. This winter, he will again combine his medical and musical talents, accompanying the Debut Orchestra of the Young Musicians Foundation on a tour of China.

Originally from New York, he studied oboe with his father, the noted oboist Harry Shulman who played in the NBC Symphony under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. In his youth, he attended the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico on numerous occasions, and spent summers in Marlboro and Aspen, where he studied composition with Darius Milhaud and Charles Jones, theory and orchestration with Gordon Hardy, and conducting with Walter Susskind and Wolfgang Vacano.

After deciding to follow his scientific interests, he went to medical school at the University of Pittsburgh, and did a peripatetic general surgical residency in New York, Seattle and San Francisco. Despite the intensity of a surgical training program, music was never far from his daily activities and when he moved to begin a practice in Los Angeles, he sought out many opportunities to play oboe in both community and professional groups. He has done studio work for several television programs, at least one of which has come out on DVD. His work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic included appearances under conductors Michael Tilson Thomas, Christopher Hogwood and Leonard Slatkin.

He became Music Director of the Los Angeles Doctors Symphony Orchestra in 1990, and took master classes under the auspices of both the American League of Symphony Orchestras and the Conductor’s Guild. As Music Director he has conducted the orchestra in Los Angeles, as well as Santa Barbara and Santa Fe. In 1994, he led the combined forces of the Los Angeles Doctors Symphony and the University of California at San Francisco Orchestra in a highly acclaimed performance of the Mahler Sixth Symphony in San Francisco. He has also appeared as guest conductor in California with the Beach Cities Symphony in Torrance, the West Coast Symphony in Santa Barbara, the Brentwood-Westwood Symphony, the Topanga Philharmonic, the West Hollywood Orchestra, the Dalhousie University Chorus in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Kenai Peninsula Orchestra in Alaska and the Los Alamos Symphony Orchestra in New Mexico. He was also the conductor of the South Coast Reading Orchestra in Santa Barbara for four seasons. With the Nevada State Opera, he has conducted performances of Don Giovanni and Carmen. In 2001, he made his European conducting debut with the Pleven Philharmonic, in Bulgaria.

In Los Angeles, Dr. Shulman had a very busy surgical practice in a large medical group, where he his interests included breast cancer, laparoscopic surgery, pacemakers, thyroid and parathyroid disease and the gamut of general surgery. He is also a Clinical Assistant Professor of Surgery at the University of Southern California, where he delighted in teaching surgical residents. In 2006, he took leave of surgery on a full-time basis, and participated in a number of surgical missions to Africa, Latin America, Oceania, the Philippines and Mongolia. During this time, he also returned to academia to pursue his musical interests once again, and received a Master’s degree in Music from the California State University at Long Beach in 2008, where he conducted and wrote a thesis on the Second Symphony of Charles Ives. He also performed other works of Ives while conducting the New Music Group. For his efforts, he received the Outstanding Graduate Thesis award from the University. He became an Adjunct Lecturer at CSULB, and is currently teaching music history. Dr. Shulman regularly serves as a judge for scholarship and musical competitions of the Young Musicians Foundation, the Westside Music Foundation and the Music Teachers Association of California.