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(New Orleans – September 13, 2019) A �������� music professor will spend the 2019-2020 academic year studying Brahms, courtesy of an ATLAS grant provided by the Louisiana Board of Regents to Louisiana artists and scholars. Music Professor Valerie Goertzen will spend her sabbatical during the 2019-2020 academic year writing a book entitled View from the Piano Bench: The Arrangements of Johannes Brahms.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was one of the most popular and prolific composers of the Romantic period. During Brahms’s lifetime, the piano was the center of a rich culture of music-making that flourished in the home and in private venues, Goertzen said.

“Brahms arranged 22 of his own compositions and more than a dozen works of other composers for piano, four hands, or two pianos, so they could be enjoyed among friends, introduced to conductors and critics in trial performances, and played by the general public. He also crafted concert showpieces for his own solo performances and technical studies based on existing pieces,” Goertzen said.

“In addition to exploring important facets of musical life in Brahms’s time, including the ways in which his new music was disseminated, learned, and experienced, the book will enhance understanding of Brahms as a composer, concert pianist, recreational player, conductor, and student of music of the past and present.”

Professor Goertzen’s new book project draws on her research for critical editions of Brahms’s piano arrangements, published in two volumes of the new Collected Edition of Brahms’s Works (Johannes Brahms Gesamtausgabe, 2012 and 2017), and decades of study of musical life in nineteenth-century Europe.
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Professor Goertzen teaches in Loyola New Orleans’ acclaimed School of Music and Theatre Arts, which has 100 years of history in the city.
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