James M. Keller is in his 25th season as Program Annotator of the San Francisco Symphony. He was for 20 years Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic, following five as its Program Editor, and served as its Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence. He regularly contributes program notes to orchestras, ensembles, concert series, music festivals, and recording companies worldwide, including long-term affiliations with the Bravo!Vail festival and the Santa Fe Opera.
He is the author of Chamber Music: A Listener's Guide (Oxford University Press) and contributed chapters to several books, including American Mavericks, George Crumb and the Alchemy of Sound, and Leonard Bernstein, American Original. In demand as a lecturer and interviewer, he spent a decade as a staff writer-editor at The New Yorker and a later decade as critic-at-large for the Santa Fe New Mexican, his hometown newspaper. He was awarded the prestigious ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for his writing in Chamber Music magazine, which he served as Contributing Editor for 20 years.
Although he is most widely known for his involvement with classical concert music, his work as a musicologist also focuses on American popular music of the 19th and early-20th centuries. He has curated major museum exhibitions in California and New Mexico about historical popular music and musical life relating to those states.
For information about program notes or other matters, please contact him at jamesMkeller@comcast.net.