Fantasies of Improvisation

Dana Gooley is Associate Professor of Music at Brown University. His research centers on European music and musical culture in the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on performance, reception, and criticism. A specialist of Franz Liszt, he has published The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge, 2004) and co-edited two essay collections, Franz Liszt and His World (Princeton, 2006) and Franz Liszt: Musicien Européen (Editions Vrin, 2012). He has also published articles on music criticism, musical mediation, improvisation, cosmopolitanism, and jazz. Gooley studied classical piano at New England Conservatory and is a self-taught jazz pianist. With his quintet he hosts the Sunday night jam session at Boston's historic jazz club Wally's Café.

• Prelude: The Virtue of Improvisation Chapter 1: The School of Abbé Vogler: Weber and Meyerbeer Chapter 2: The Kapellmeister Network and the Performance of Community: Hummel, Moscheles, and Mendelssohn Chapter 3: Carl Loewe's Performative Romanticism Chapter 4: Schumann and the Economization of Musical Labor Chapter 5: Liszt and the Romantic Rhetoric of Improvisation Chapter 6: Improvisatoriness: The Regime of the Improvisation Imaginary Postlude: Improvisation and Utopia

This is an extremely interesting book on a topic that has not received as much attention as it deserves ... Highly recommended.