Life and career
Keller was born into a wealthy and culturally well-connected
Jewish family in
Vienna, and, as a boy, was taught by the same
Oskar Adler who had, decades earlier, been
Arnold Schoenberg's boyhood friend and first teacher. He also came to know the composer and performer
Franz Schmidt, but was never a formal pupil. In 1938, the
Anschluss forced Keller to flee to London (where he had relatives), and, in the years that followed, he became a prominent and influential figure in the UK's musical and music-critical life. Initially active as a violinist and
violist, he soon found his niche as a highly prolific and provocative writer on music, as well as an influential teacher, lecturer, broadcaster and coach. An original thinker never afraid of controversy, Keller's passionate support of composers whose work he saw as under-valued or insufficiently understood made him a tireless advocate of
Benjamin Britten and
Arnold Schoenberg, as well as an illuminating analyst of figures such as
Mozart,
Haydn,
Beethoven and
Mendelssohn. Many of Keller's earliest articles appeared in the journals
Music Review and
Music Survey, the latter of which was co-edited by him after he joined the founding editor
Donald Mitchell for the so-called 'New Series' (1949–52). In later years, much of his advocacy was carried out from within the
BBC, where he came to hold several senior positions and was a regular contributor to
The Listener magazine. When
William Glock was appointed controller of music at the BBC in 1959 one of his first acts was to recruit Keller as music talks producer. It was at the BBC that Keller (in collaboration with
Susan Bradshaw) perpetrated in 1961 the "
Piotr Zak" hoax, broadcasting a deliberately nonsensical series of random noises, as a new avant-garde piece by a fictitious Polish composer. The hoax was designed to demonstrate the poor quality of critical discourse surrounding contemporary music at a problematic stage in its historical development; in this aspect, the hoax was a failure, as no critic expressed any particular enthusiasm for Piotr Zak's piece, with all published reviews being roundly dismissive of the work. In 1967, Keller had a famous encounter with the rock group
Pink Floyd on the TV show
The Look of the Week in which he interviewed band members
Syd Barrett and
Roger Waters. Keller was generally puzzled by, or even contemptuous of, the group and its music, repeatedly returning to the criticism that they were too loud for his taste. He ended his interview segment with the band by saying: "my verdict is that it is a little bit of a regression to childhood – but, after all, why not?" This interview was released as part of Pink Floyd's 2016 box set,
The Early Years 1965–1972. Keller's gift for systematic thinking, allied to his philosophical and
psycho-analytic knowledge, bore fruit in the method of "
wordless functional analysis" (abbreviated by the
football-loving Keller as "
FA"), designed to furnish incontrovertibly audible demonstrations of a masterwork's "all-embracing background unity". This method was developed in tandem with a "Theory of Music" that explicitly considered musical structure from the point of view of
listener expectations; the "meaningful contradiction" of expected "background" by unexpectable "foreground" was seen as generating a work's expressive content. An element of Keller's theory of unity was the "Principle of Reversed and Postponed Antecedents and Consequents", which has not been widely adopted. His term "
homotonality", however, has proved useful to musicologists in several fields. Keller was married to the artist
Milein Cosman, whose drawings illustrated some of his work. His manuscripts (radio broadcasts and musicological writings) are kept at the
Cambridge University Library. == Dedications and awards ==
Writings
• 'Film Music', Sight and Sound, no.60 (1946–7), 136; no.62 (1947), 63–4; no.64 (1947–8), 168–9; MR, x (1949), 50–51, 138, 225–6, 303; xi (1950), 52–3; Music Survey, i (1949), 196–7; ii (1949–50), 25–7, 101–2, 188–9, 250–51; iii (1950–51), 42–3; MT, xcvi (1955), 265–6 • Benjamin Britten: Albert Herring (London, 1947) • Benjamin Britten: The Rape of Lucretia (London, 1947) • The Need for Competent Film Music Criticism (London, 1947) • 'Britten and Mozart: a Challenge in the Form of Variations on an Unfamiliar Theme', ML, xxix (1948), 17–30; unauthorized Ger. trans., ÖMz, v (1950), 138–47 • 'The Beggar's Opera', Tempo, no.10 (1948–9), 7–13 • 'Resistances to Britten's Music: their Psychology', Music Survey, ii (1949–50), 227–36 • 'Arthur Benjamin and the Problem of Popularity', Tempo, no.15 (1950), 4–15 • 'Schoenberg and the Men of the Press', Music Survey, iii (1950–51), 160–68 • 'Is Opera Really Necessary?', Opera, ii (1951), 337–45, 402–9 • ed., with D. Mitchell: Benjamin Britten: a Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists (London, 1952) [incl. 'Peter Grimes: the Story, the Music not Excluded', 111–31; 'The Musical Character', 319–51] • 'The Idomeneo Gavotte's Vicissitude', MR, xiv (1953), 155–7 • 'Film Music: British', Grove5 • 'National Frontiers in Music', Tempo, no.33 (1954), 23–30 • 'First Performances: Dodecaphoneys', MR, xvi (1955), 323–9 • 'First Performances: their Pre- and Reviews', MR, xvi (1955), 141–7 • 'Strict Serial Technique in Classical Music', Tempo, no.37 (1955), 12–24 • 'The Chamber Music', The Mozart Companion, ed. H.C.R. Landon and D. Mitchell (London, 1956), 90–137 • 'The Entführung's "Vaudeville"', MR, xvii (1956), 304–13 • 'Key Characteristics', Tempo, no.40 (1956), 5–16 • 'KV503: the Unity of Contrasting Themes and Movements', MR, xvii (1956), 48–58, 120–29 • 'The New in Review', MR, xvii (1956), 94–5, 153–4, 251–3, 332–6; xviii (1957), 48–51, 150–53, 221–4; xix (1958), 52–4, 137–41, 226–8, 319–22; xx (1959), 71–2, 159–62, 289–99; xxi (1960), 79–80; xxii (1961), 51–2 • 'Serial Octave Transpositions', MMR, lxxxvi (1956), 139–43, 172–7 • 'A Slip of Mozart's: its Analytical Significance', Tempo, no.42 (1956–7), 12–15 • 'Elgar the Progressive', MR, xviii (1957), 294–9 • 'Functional Analysis: its Pure Appreciation', MR, xviii (1957), 202–6; xix (1958), 192–200; see also MR, xxi (1960), 73–6, 237–9 • 'Rhythm: Gershwin and Stravinsky', The Score, no.20 (1957), 19–31 • 'Schoenberg's "Moses and Aron"', The Score, no.21 (1957), 30–45 • 'Knowing Things Backwards', Tempo, no.46 (1958), 14–20 • 'Principles of Composition', The Score, no.26 (1960), 35–45; no.27 (1960), 9–21 • 'New Music: Beethoven's Choral Fantasy', The Score, no.28 (1961), 38–47 • 'Whose Fault is the Speaking Voice?', Tempo, no.75 (1965–6), 12–17 • 'Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart', 'Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky', The Symphony, i, ed. R. Simpson (Harmondsworth, 1966–7), 50–103, 342–53 • 'The Contemporary Problem', Tempo, no.82 (1967), 29; no.83 (1967–8), 24–5; no.84 (1968), 25–6; no.85 (1968), 30–33; no.86 (1968), 26–7; no.87 (1968–9), 76–9; no.88 (1969), 56–7; no.89 (1969), 25, 27–8; no.91 (1969–70), 34–6 • 'Towards a Theory of Music', The Listener (11 June 1970) • 'Shostakovich's Twelfth Quartet', Tempo, no.94 (1970), 6–15 • 'Closer Towards a Theory of Music', The Listener (18 Feb 1971) • 'Music and Psychopathology', History of Medicine, iii/2 (1971), 3–7 • 'Mozart's Wrong Key Signature', Tempo, no.98 (1972), 21–7 • 'Schoenberg: the Future of Symphonic Thought', PNM, xiii/1 (1974–5), 3–20 • 'Music 1975’, New Review, no.24 (1976), 17–53 • 'The Classical Romantics: Schumann and Mendelssohn', Of German Music: a Symposium, ed. H.-H. Schönzeler (London and New York, 1976), 179–218 • 'Description, Analysis and Criticism: a Differential Diagnosis', Soundings [Cardiff], vi (1977), 108–20 • 'My Family, You and I', New Review, nos.34–5 (1977), 13–23 • 1975 (1984 minus 9) (London, 1977) • 'The State of the Symphony: not only Maxwell Davies', Tempo, no.125 (1978), 6–11 • 'Operatic Music and Britten', The Operas of Benjamin Britten, ed. D. Herbert (London, 1979), xiii–xxxi • 'Schoenberg's Return to Tonality', Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, v/1 (1981), 2–21 • 'Epilogue/Prologue: Criticism and Analysis', MAn, i (1982), 9–31 • (with M. Cosman): Stravinsky Seen and Heard (London, 1982) • 'Goethe and the Lied', Goethe Revisited: a Collection of Essays, ed. E.M. Wilkinson (London, 1984), 73–84 • 'The Musician as Librettist', Opera, xxxv (1984), 1095–9 • 'Personal Recollections: Oskar Adler's and My Own', in H. Truscott: The Music Forum of Franz Schmidt, i: The Orchestral Music (London, 1984), 7–17 • 'Whose Authenticity?', EMc, xii (1984), 517–19 • 'Functional Analysis of Mozart's G minor Quintet', MAn, iv (1985), 73–94 • The Great Haydn Quartets: Their Interpretation (London, 1986) • Criticism (London, 1987) • C. Wintle, ed.: Essays on Music (Cambridge, 1994) • C. Wintle, ed.: Three Psychoanalytic Notes on Peter Grimes (1946) (London, 1995) == Bibliography ==