I was awarded a Fulbright student award to Vienna for the 1983–84 academic year. I was a 30-year-old, first-generation graduate student at Yale University, and I had never been to Europe before. I’ve never had an experience more life changing. I was able to work in the archives of the Austrian National Library studying Alban Berg’s sketches for the first time, and this research produced not only my dissertation, but the ensuing book that was published by UC Press and awarded an ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award. This book also allowed me to achieve tenure at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I taught after graduating from Yale.

I took full advantage of the cultural offerings of Vienna, attending performances of Berg’s operas at the Staatsoper as well as Sunday concerts at the Musikverein. The timing of my award was perfect in that celebrations of the Berg centennial were underway, with performances of many of his compositions.

My two-year-old son, who accompanied me to Vienna, became fluent in German—and as a result learned Japanese effortlessly. He now works as a translator in Tokyo, where he has his own company. We recently converged on Vienna from Ann Arbor and Tokyo to revisit some of our favorite places.

Fulbright Austria generously granted me a Fulbright scholar grant in 2003, which allowed me to complete a second book, this one on the sketches for Wozzeck. With this book, published by Oxford University Press, I was promoted to full professor. In 2024, as a professor at the University of Michigan, I accompanied 22 U-M students who had a concert at the Jewish Museum Vienna, where they performed music I had reconstructed from manuscripts at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was a delight to watch these students, who had never visited Austria, discover and enjoy Vienna—as I had forty years before.

I am so attached to Vienna that I often visit it in May. If anything, Vienna is now even more wonderful than when I first arrived in 1983. I am deeply grateful to Fulbright Austria for these opportunities and the profound effect they have had on my life and academic career.