Valerie Goertzen

Dr. Valerie Woodring Goertzen has taught courses in music history and research at Loyola since 2003. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Fulbright Fellowship (Austria), grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Loyola Marquette Fellowship, and an ATLAS Grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents. She received a Loyola Faculty Senate award for teaching in 2012. In summers 2013, 2015, 2018, and 2022 she enjoyed a scholar’s retreat in the Brahmshaus-Studio, an apartment maintained by the Johannes Brahms Society Baden-Baden in a house where the composer rented rooms during summers 1865 to 1874 and created some of his best-loved works.

Dr. Goertzen’s publications include two volumes of the collected works of Johannes Brahms (Johannes Brahms Gesamtausgabe, editorial office in Kiel, Germany) containing arrangements for piano of works of other composers. With Robert W. Eshbach she coedited The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim (Boydell, 2021), a collection of essays exploring the life and works of the distinguished nineteenth-century violinist and composer. She has published journal articles and essays on topics relating to Brahms, Joachim, improvisation by pianists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the programs of Clara Schumann, and has presented papers at conferences in the United States, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy. Dr. Goertzen is a past President of the American Brahms Society and coeditor, with Loyola Professor Emeritus Dr. William P. Horne, of the Society’s semiannual Newsletter. Her current projects include a book on the piano arrangements of Brahms.

Dr. Valerie Goertzen Interview from Loyola University on Vimeo.