“How is it an American like you is interested in Thomas Mann?” Europeans would ask me this question, some with great earnestness and focused eyes. Did a professor give me the topic? Were my parents European? Had I read Mann in German? (“He is hard even for us to read!” they would exclaim in disbelief.) One inquirer was so pleasantly intrigued that she bought me lunch so that I might explain. 
     It was all the fault of music.
     I’ve been drawn to music since I was a child listening to my mother play the piano. (“The Black Hawk Waltz” with tremolo was a favorite) In high school I excelled in flute and continuing to study it, majored in the Program in the Arts at Barnard College. In New York, all the arts came alive for me, first-hand and in writing about them. Literature did as well. I loved Spanish literature, and neared a second major in it, but I was strangely attracted to the German writer Thomas Mann. Many writers love music and describe it in their work. This one composed it. Mann’s long sentences could have been Mahler, and the way he developed one idea into the next, Brahms. To see that music and writing could be so closely related came as a revelation. To think that music could be found in visual art as well lighted up my imagination. For the Program in the Arts, I wrote my senior essay on Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a novel that showed me an identity of Thomas Mann and of my own thought. I graduated in 1974, my essay, passed “with distinction.”

     Thereafter: DAAD fellowship to the University of Munich, Ph.D. in Music from Columbia University; M.A. in Spanish Literature and later on, M.A. in Art History from Penn State University; Adjunct Lecturer in Music at the Penn State Scranton and Wilkes-Barre campuses; music historian and art reviewer for “ArtScene” on WVIA-FM, former Chair of the Community Advisory Board at WVIA, now called VIA Public Media; and second soprano in the Marywood University Concert Choir. “About Me” is about my connection to the arts, music foremost, and about sharing them and guarding them for the benefit of all.