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Arts Division
Music Department
PhD Candidate in Cross-Cultural Musicology
PhD Cross-Cultural Musicology
Graduate
Music Center
Music Center
Sean Keenan is a musician and scholar based in San Francisco, California. He is currently a PhD candidate in Cross-Cultural Musicology at UC Santa Cruz, studying under Amy C. Beal. His dissertation research focuses on downtown New York experimental music communities during the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. Keenan often performs with various improvising groups, both around and outside of the Bay Area, generally playing either electric guitar or bass guitar. He also regularly performs solo or as a duo, using a mix of acoustic instruments, and altering their sounds through electronic processes. His debut solo album Delay Music (2025) utilizes field recordings processed through Max MSP and is now available through Mixed Media Recordings.
Prior Education:
2019 M.F.A. in Music Performance and Literature, Mills College, Oakland, CA
2008 B.A. in Art and Design, Columbia College, Chicago, IL
Residencies:
2026 Jazz and Sonic Arts Residency, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, AB, Canada
Experimental Music
Improvisation
"David Moss Dense Band: Structuring Improvisation in the Studio"
American Musicological Society Nothern California Chapter Conference
Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford, California, 2026
"Experimental Interactions Downtown: Demographic/Stylistic Divisions and Overlap"
Society for American Music Annual Meeting, Richmond, Virginia, 2026
"Community, Race, and Politics Downtown"
American Musicological Society and Society for Music Theory Joint Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2025
"Semiology of Text Scores: Analyzing La Monte Young's Compositions 1960"
American Musicological Society Northern California Chapter Conference
University of California, Berkeley, 2022
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