Aloha, Hawaii!

I am happy to announce that I will be presenting my paper, "Goethe and Schubert: A Transcendence of Competing Aesthetics" at the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities. I submitted the paper at the urging of my teacher, and then when it got accepted, realized just how unlikely it would be that I would raise the funds to actually attend. Over lunch with a friend, I was discussing my predicament, and something really amazing happened (this is verbatim from a Facebook post I made on September 5):***I have an experience to share that left me feeling grateful and humbled. While having lunch with Christopher Cayari, I was lamenting the fact that I had a paper accepted at a conference in Hawaii, for which I am applying for a travel grant, but the grant has a maximum of [x] and it would take me at least twice that to make it feasible to attend the conference. I think I mentioned that I was hoping to get some matching funds from another source, but had not had much luck. "If I could just get some other source to match [x], I think I could do it!" I must have said. A woman who was about to exit the restaurant laid a $10 bill on the table in front of me and said, "Now you only need [x-10]." This happened so fast that I wasn't really able to process what she had just said or done until she was out the door, so I did not even get the chance to properly thank her. I'm sorry to admit that the first thing I felt was not gratitude, but a sense of shame that there I was having lunch out in a restaurant (I could have packed a sandwich) and someone I didn't even know thought I needed financial help. But the second thing I felt was that I had just learned a very profound lesson. I put the $10 in a bottle marked "Hawaii Fund" and it is out on my desk to remind me of the generosity of a stranger and that I can find a way to make this happen, maybe by taking on an additional private student, maybe by doing a fundraising recital, maybe finding another grant (I don't even know if I'll get the first one yet). Thank you to the anonymous donor for the cash, and more importantly, the lesson!***Since then, I have been awarded a travel grant from the Graduate College of the University of Illinois, and a scholarship from the MONC fund in addition to my first anonymous donation. This should cover my conference registration and about 1/3 of my plane ticket. I am hoping to raise additional funds by presenting a workshop in Indianapolis (Indy folks stay tuned). I don't like taking money without giving anything in return, however, I did put a Paypal "Donate" button on this blog just in case anyone, like the anonymous donor who got me started on the way, would like to chip in.My paper topic is about artistic collaboration, which is a subject very near and dear to my heart. Here is the abstract of my paper:Would Goethe have appreciated Schubert's settings of his poems? It is not difficult to ascertain what Goethe thought about music—he corresponded with the composer Carl Zelter for more than thirty years, came up with an outline for a theoretical system, wrote texts specifically intended to be set to music (including a sequel to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte), and commented frequently about music in his writings. It is not clear how to interpret his near-silence about the work of Schubert. This paper examines recent scholarship on the relationship (or lack thereof) between poet and composer, including Lorraine Byrne Bodley's Schubert's Goethe Settings, Sterling Lambert's Re-Reading Poetry: Schubert's Multiple Settings of Goethe, and Kenneth Whitton's Goethe and Schubert: The Unseen Bond, presenting both sides of the argument regarding whether Goethe would have appreciated Schubert, some additional speculations, and further analysis. The debate has largely been framed by the question of whether Goethe was musical, which might be the wrong question to ask. Perhaps the greatness of Schubert's Goethe settings is partly due to, not in spite of, the two men's different sensibilities. The story of Goethe and Schubert contains a valuable lesson for artistic collaboration: a shared sense of aesthetics is not a prerequisite for creating excellent collaborative art.I'm very excited to be attending this conference!