Dana Gooley
Associate Professor of Music:
Music
Phone:
gooley@brown.edu
Dana Gooley's research centers on European music and musical culture in the 19th century, with an emphasis on performance culture and the public sphere. A specialist of Franz Liszt and other pianists, he has also published on music criticism, virtuosity, and improvisation. He is writing a book on the aesthetics of improvisation in the 19th century. In his second research area, jazz history, he has worked on jam sessions, the jazz "standard," and conventional tropes of performance.
Biography
I studied piano at New England Conservatory and English at Wesleyan University before pursuing my Ph.D. in musicology at Princeton University, finishing in 1999. My research has centered on Franz Liszt, music criticism, and the 19th century cult of the virtuoso. While in graduate school I developed a passion for jazz and I still perform regularly with my quartet Inventions. I also began giving courses in jazz history and this has fed into my secondary area, jazz history. I am currently writing a book on improvisation and the 19th century piano-virtuoso. Since coming to Brown I have taken a strong interest in bridging performance studies and music history, and this has led to some new projects on the history of conventions of musical performance. I give courses on music history, improvisation, opera, historiography, jazz, and European cultural history.
Teaching
I generally teach courses in the history of European classical music of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, as well as courses in the history of jazz. I currently offer courses surveying the history of opera and of classical music in the 19th-20th centuries. I have given interdisciplinary seminars on improvisation and on the fantastic in art, literature and music. My jazz courses include a context-rich survey of jazz history as well as seminars on Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. I have also taught courses on film music, virtuosity, and music theory.
Funded Research
Dana Gooley received a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to spend a year in Berlin researching his dissertation research, and an award from the American Musicological Society (AMS 50) to complete it. After completion he received a short-term research grant from the DAAD, and has recently received research travel grants from the W. P. Jones fund and the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. He received the Wendy Strothman Faculty Research Award in 2011 and will use it to continue archival research in Berlin.
Curriculum Vitae
