Valerie Goertzen, Ph.D., assistant professor of music history, presented her paper, "Clara Schumann’s Improvisations and Her Mosaics of Small Forms," at an international music history conference in La Spezia, Italy this summer. "Beyond Notes: Improvisation in Western Music in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," was held at the Centro di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and organized by the Società dei Concerti of La Spezia, and the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini of Lucca.