Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Dana Gooley is a musicologist and Professor of Music at Brown University, where he teaches courses on the history of jazz, classical music, improvisation, and musical theater. He has published two books: The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge University Press, 2004), a study of Franz Liszt’s concert career in historical context, and Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth Century Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), which reconstructs free improvisational practices and fantasies in 19th-century European music. He has published articles on music criticism, cosmopolitanism, jazz, opera, and Stephen Sondheim. He is currently completing a book on Art Blakey’s historic album Moanin’. As a faculty fellow at the Cogut Institute, he will be writing his book “The Theater of Musical Performance,” which draws on performance studies and music history to examine the conventions underlying concert “staging.”