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 an ATLAS Grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents, a Fulbright Fellowship (Austria), grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Loyola Marquette Fellowship. She received a Loyola Faculty Senate award for teaching in 2012. In summers 2013, 2015, and 2018 she enjoyed a scholar’s retreat in the Brahmshaus-Studio, an apartment maintained by the 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 the essay collection The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim, co-edited with Robert Whitehouse Eshbach (Boydell, 2021), and 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. She has written journal articles and essays on topics relating to Brahms, the composer-violinist Joseph 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 President of the American Brahms Society and coeditor, with Loyola Professor Emeritus Dr. William P. Horne, of the Society’s Newsletter. She is past co-chair of the Women's Studies Interdisciplinary Minor at Loyola. Currently she is writing a book on the piano arrangements of Brahms.

Dr. Valerie Goertzen Interview from Loyola University on Vimeo.