Keane, David

Websites:  No
Origin: Akron, Ohio, USA 🇺🇸 → Vancouver, British Columbia → Kingston, Ontario, 🇨🇦
Biography:

David Keane (1943–2017) was a composer, performer, educator, and writer whose work helped define Canadian electroacoustic music. Born in Akron, Ohio, he studied piano, trumpet, and double bass, wrote his first electronic piece in 1963, and immigrated to Canada in 1967 as part of a wave of young artists settling here in the 1960s. His first Canadian years were spent teaching in public schools, playing bass in the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and lecturing at Simon Fraser University. In 1970 he moved to Kingston to join the Queen’s University School of Music, where he taught composition and double bass, founded the Electronic/Electroacoustic Music Studio, and served as its director until 1997, shaping a generation of Canadian sonic arts practice. He became a Canadian citizen in 1974.

Keane’s music characteristically combines live performers with tape and electronics, reflecting a long-standing interest in polyphony and in musical perception—especially the listener’s discovery, through repeated hearings, of subtle and complex transformational patterns. His catalogue spans dance, theatre, film, radio, installations, chamber and orchestral writing, and tape/electroacoustic works. Among representative pieces are Lyra (1978) for piano and tape recorder, an exploration of the piano’s formant and timbral constraints that contrasts percussive alterations of the instrument with long electronic crescendos; Elegy (1978) for double bass and tape recorder, commissioned by Belgian Radio and focused on the bass’s rich overtone spectrum; Evening Song (1978), setting texts by Toronto filmmaker Bruce Elder for soprano and tape in a quasi-spoken style; and In Memoriam: Hugh LeCaine (1978), a tribute to the scientist-composer whose pioneering instruments and research shaped Canada’s electronic music. These works were performed internationally, from the First Annual Festival of Electronic Music at the Music Gallery, Toronto (January 1979), to the Eighth International Festival of Experimental Music in Bourges, France (June 1978). His LP Lyra, recorded at the Queen’s University Electronic Music Studios, preserves several of these pieces and stands as a key document of the period.

Supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, Keane produced work for the National Film Board, the National Gallery of Canada, the CBC, the National Design Council, and the Ontario Science Centre, with additional commissions from France, the United States, and the Cuban Commission for UNESCO. He served as an adjudicator for the National Design Council, the Laidlaw Foundation, and the CBC, and produced music for both the CBC and the NFB. He wrote extensively on technology, pedagogy, and aesthetics in Canadian Music Educator, Computer Music Journal, Canadian University Music Review, Musicworks, Queen’s Quarterly, and other journals, and authored the classic Tape Music Composition (Oxford, 1980), one of the first systematic English-language guides to the medium.

As a builder of Canada’s electroacoustic ecosystem, Keane’s 1984 survey “Electroacoustic Music in Canada: 1950–1984” places the Queen’s studios among the country’s long-standing centres “in the limelight,” noting that Queen’s was the final beneficiary of Hugh LeCaine’s NRC-designed equipment and situating the studio alongside UBC, SFU, York, and McGill. In 1983 he helped found the Canadian Association of Electroacoustic Music, the national federation within CIME/ICEM, and his music earned international recognition at the Bourges competition. His work circulated through the national network of studios, concert series, and festivals—including the Music Gallery’s electroacoustic festivals begun in 1979—underscoring his role as both practitioner and advocate.

Keane was an Associate of the Canadian Music Centre and a member of the Canadian League of Composers, and he is represented on dedicated albums—Lyra, Aurora (Electroacoustic Tone Poems), and Dialogics—as well as on compilations such as The Anthology of Canadian Music. His vinyl-era output was later gathered in a two-disc anthology issued in April 2023, drawing together Lyra (Music Gallery, 1979), Aurora (Cambridge Street Records, 1985), and his CAPAC “Portrait Musical” single, with contextual material from the original releases.

He passed away on June 20, 2017, after a long struggle with dementia and ALS. Colleagues and institutions remembered a prolific, generous artist-scholar whose Kingston base quietly radiated across Canada and abroad; donations in his name were suggested to the ALS Society of Canada and to the Canadian Music Centre.
-Robert Williston